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‘‘ ‘ There was Irene herself in the room.’ ” 


[Page 247.] 


CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I What They Found in the Ice i 

II The First Covert 13 

III The Unseen Visitor 27 

IV What Jeffrey Saw 37 

V The Jade Earring 50 

VI Believing in Ghosts 64 

VII The Face Under the Paint 76 

VIII An Even Break 93 

IX Fighting the Devil with Fire 105 

X The First Confession 120 

XI An Escape 138 

XII Through the Grille 150 

XIII Beech Hill 163 

XIV Doctor Crow Forgets 178 

XV A Night Ride 198 

'‘XVI The Housebreakers 212 

XVII The Third Confession 229 

XVHI A Question of Centimeters 259 

XIX What We Saw in the Cave 272 

XX The Watchers and the Watched 286 

XXI How It Ended 313 


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CHAPTER I 

WHAT THEY FOUND IN THE ICE 

W E didn’t often talk about crimes in our family. 

Not, at least, about the mysterious, inexplic- 
able crimes of violence that trumpeted their horrors 
at you every little while from the front pages of the 
papers. When you have been there yourself, have 
seen names you know and love pilloried there, you 
know altogether too well how it feels, to take an idle 
curious interest when the thing happens to someone 
else. 

But this present mystery proved an exception. It 
seemed so completely detached from all human mo- 
tive, so devoid of the usual accessories of grief, and 
agony, and shame, that we found ourselves discussing 
it that night without reservation — Jack and Gwen- 
dolen, his pretty young wife, and Madeline and I. 
If we discussed it with a sort of exaggerated non- 
chalance, which showed that really in the background 
of all our minds that other mystery still lurked and 
cast its shadow — the murder of the man who had 
been Madeline’s husband and Jack’s father- — I 
doubt if any outsider would have been able to de- 
tect it. 

But Jeffrey wasn’t an outsider. And he has the 

I 


THE GHOST GIRL 


most amazingly sensitive perceptions of any man I 
know. That is, perhaps, the reason why he can paint 
the way he can; can open up the innermost recesses 
of character in those beautiful, terrible canvases of 
his. We weren’t expecting him; didn’t know, in- 
deed, that he’d come back from his two months’ vaca- 
tion. And you might have expected that our sur- 
prise and pleasure at the sight of him and the 
warmth of our greetings, would have veiled every- 
thing else. We were all trying to shake hands with 
him at once and patting him on the back, demanding 
to know when he returned and why he didn’t tell us 
in advance; so that we gave him no chance to 
answer or even to take off his overcoat. 

But instead of even trying to answer, he stepped 
back and stood looking at us, from one face to an- 
other and puckered up his eyebrows in a puzzled 
frown. 

‘‘ What in the world,” he asked, “ have all you 
people been talking about? ” 

Nobody answered for a minute. There was 
something almost uncanny about it. Madeline gave 
a little shiver. Jack’s wife stood looking at Jeffrey 
with that level, thoughtful look of hers, and finally 
said: — 

“ I’m glad I haven’t any secrets. Could you 
keep your own, do you think, as well as you can read 
other people’s? ” 

“ I don’t know,” said Jeffrey. “ It would be an 


2 


WHAT THEY FOUND IN THE ICE 


interesting experiment to try. But what a perfectly 
detestable character you’re giving me. I own I 
deserve it, walking into a roomful of people and ask- 
ing them what they’ve been talking about.” 

“ You know perfectly well,” said Madeline, “ that 
in this household there never could be a wish to keep 
anything from you. You’ve earned, many times 
over, the right to ask us what we have been talking 
about. But, in this case, it wasn’t a secret at all. 
We were talking about the girl they found in the 
ice last month.” 

Jeffrey looked puzzled. “Found in the ice?” 
he questioned. “Who?” 

“ You don’t mean to say you haven’t heard 
of it! ” I cried. “ The country’s been ringing with 
it.” 

“Yes, but I haven’t been in the country,” said 
Jeffrey. “ I only landed late this afternoon. Went 
straight over to The Atlas, got my first fresh water 
bath in three weeks, dined and came up here. 
Didn’t even stop to read the evening papers.” 

“ You’re looking pretty well,” I commented, 
“ certainly a sight better than when you went away. 
You had us all worried.” 

“ It was fearfully unmannerly of me,” said Jeff- 
rey to Madeline, “to run off that way without a 
word, but I suspect I did need a rest pretty badly. 
I decided to go all in a minute. The decorators 
were at work there in the studio and every time they 
3 


THE GHOST GIRL 


pulled down a bit of loose plaster, I went up in the 
air. So at last I gave the key to my Jap and fled.” 

“ Sit down,” I commanded him, “ and light a pipe, 
and tell us all about it. Where you’ve been and 
what you’ve been doing.” 

Jeffrey lighted a pipe obediently enough, and set- 
tled down in the big chair which Jack rolled round 
in front of the fire for him, but then instead of be- 
ginning his Odyssey, as I had commanded him, he 
smoked in silence for a minute, then turned to Gwen- 
dolen and asked: 

“What about the girl in the ice? Oh, my ad- 
ventures will keep,” he went on, as I started to pro- 
test. “ You will be hearing about them for the next 
six months. A returned traveler’s a nuisance any- 
way. Besides, you’ve whetted my curiosity. Be a 
good chap and let Mrs. Jack satisfy it.” 

It was natural that he should have turned to 
Gwendolen for the story. We all did that when we 
wanted the facts about anything. Her voice was so 
lovely in the first place, that there was a sort of sen- 
suous pleasure just in listening to her. And then, 
when Gwendolen told it, you knew it was so. 

People have a way of talking about truth-telling 
as if it were simply a matter of good intentions. 
You have told the truth unless you meant to be a 
liar. And yet, if you will stop to think, you can 
probably call to mind half a dozen people who you 
know are honest, and whom you wouldn’t believe on 
4 


WHAT THEY FOUND IN THE ICE 


oath. And if you’re a lawyer like me, your diffi- 
culty will be the other way; to think of half a 
dozen whose account of an occurrence you could be- 
lieve absolutely and literally and without discounts 
or reservations. Well, Gwendolen would certainly 
head the list in my half dozen. 

“ I don’t know where you were two months ago,” 
Gwendolen began, ‘‘ and you may not have heard 
that we had a week of the coldest weather they have 
known here since they began to keep the records. 
The thermometer stayed below zero for six days. 
Most of the time it was a long way below. It came 
very suddenly, so that the river, which had been 
entirely open, froze within that week over eight 
inches deep and the ice people began cutting. Six 
weeks ago an ice cutter at Silver Springs discovered 
a body frozen in the ice. It was a grl — a young 
woman somewhere in her twenties. Even in the 
picto£s they took of her, she was very very beauti- 
ful.^’ And what she must have been really, well, one 
tan imagine it! Because, you see, the body wasn’t 
changed at all. It had frozen juit exactly as it 
was, probably within a few hours after it had been 
put in the water.” 

“ Been put! ” echoed Jeffrey. ‘‘ Then she hadn’t 
drowned herself? ” 

“ No,” said Gwendolen, “ it was — murder. She 
had been shot through the heart ” 

“ Still,” interrupted Jeffrey, “ why murder? Why 
5 


THE GHOST GIRL 

not suicide with the revolver and a tumble into the 
river? ” 

“ It was murder,” said I, for Gwendolen had 
hesitated over the horror of the thing. 

“ No powder marks around the wound, I sup- 
pose,” suggested Jeffrey. “ Shot fired from a dis- 
tance.” 

I nodded. 

“How was she dressed?” he concluded. He 
turned to Gwendolen with that question. 

“ That’s one of the weirdest things about it,” 


said G^ 

“ She was in evening dress — 

dressed 

a ball, and her hair — perfectly 

wonderi 

must have been from the picture 

— was ' . 

ay, too.” 

“ Am 

en’t identified her? ” questioned 

Jeffrey. 

body was literally in perfect pres- 

ervatior 

y 

“ It 

Gwendolen. “You could evr 

see the 

larks of the rings on her finger 

they sai 
“Th 

) robbery, doesn’t it? ” said Je 


rey. “ She’d have worn her rings to the ball.” 

“ She hadn’t been at the ball,” said Gwendole 
“At least, she wasn’t in ball dress when she W' 
murdered. There was no bullet hole in the bodice 
of her gown and no stain of blood on the white satin. 
They dressed her that way after she was killed. So 
you see it wasn’t robbery. 

6 


WHAT THEY FOUND IN THE ICE 

“ I can’t help thinking,” Gwendolen concluded, 
“ that the murder was committed by some Insane per- 
son. Because, It doesn’t seem that anyone In his 
senses would have run that risk and taken that 
trouble to do, what one would think, must make the 
identification easier.” 

“ It Is possible,” said Jeffrey, “ that If he’d read 
the weather report, he wouldn’t have done it.” 

The remark sounded perfectly flippant to me, but 
I caught a sudden look of Intelligence In Gwendolen’s 
eyes and saw that Jeffrey had meant something by It. 
In the same moment he saw the bewilderment In 
mine. 

“ Assuming,” he explained, “ that the person was 
still sane, he might almost safely have counted on 
the current carrying the body away altogether and 
never being found. And If he wanted to dis- 
pose of the dress at the same time, perhaps that was 
as good a way to do It as any. But he didn’t count 
on the freeze. That must have caused him some 
pretty bad nights, I should think, and days hardly 
better. It’s perfectly extraordinary, when you 
come to think of It, that she hasn’t been Identified. 
You say the pictures were published in the pa- 
pers? ” 

“ Everywhere,” I exclaimed. “ The country’s 
been ringing with It.” 

“ Well,” said Jeffrey, In the tone of one who dis- 
misses the subject, “ that’s very Interesting.” 

7 


THE GHOST GIRL 


“ Walt a minute ! ” exclaimed Jack. “ I can show 
you the picture. I cut it out of the paper and laid 
it away somewhere.” 

“ Don’t bother! ” exclaimed Jeffrey. 

“ No bother at all.” Jack already had his hand 
on the door. 

“ To tell you the truth,” Jeffrey admitted, “ I 
don’t believe I want to look at it. Let’s talk about 
something else. Dead faces are beginning to get a 
little on my nerves. Oh, it’s nothing serious,” he 
went on, seeing the look of surprise on our faces, 
“ and no doubt it’s silly of me to feel that way about 
it. But — well, I mean it just the same.” 

“ I suppose,” said Madeline, “ that you’re loaded 
up with commissions after your vacation. You must 
have sitters three or four deep clamoring at your 
studio door.” 

“ I don’t know,” said Jeffrey. “ I haven’t seen 
my business man since I came back. Haven’t even 
been to my studio. But I hope to heaven he doesn’t 
get me any more commissions like the last one. You 
knew what that was, didn’t you?” He turned to 
me. “ The thing I was at work on when I bolted? ” 

“ I seem to remember,” said I, “ that you were 
doing some work for Miss Meredith.” 

The Miss Meredith? ” questioned Madeline. 

Jeffrey nodded. “ The same. The queer, rich, 
invisible Miss Meredith.” 

We all exclaimed over his last word. “ Invisible I 
8 


WHAT THEY FOUND IN THE ICE 

Then what were you painting? A spirit picture of 
her?” 

The last question was Jack’s. It seemed to ef- 
fect Jeffrey a little unpleasantly, foi he gave a little 
shake to his head as one will when a fly is buzzing 
about one’s ear, 

“ I wasn’t doing a portrait of her,” he explained. 
‘‘ I was painting from a photograph, and a few relics 
and souvenirs, what was meant for a portrait of a 
niece of hers — I think it was a niece — who, I un- 
derstand, died several years ago.” 

I laughed. “ I knew some men did that sort of 
work. It’s rather a new line for you, isn’t it? ” 

“ Never before,” said Jeffrey, and never again! 
Of course they offered me a perfectly immoral price 
for it, but even at that, I shouldn’t have done it, 
except for the fact that I found the photograph they 
showed me rather attractive.” 

“ Beautiful, I suppose,” said Madeline. “ That 
shouldn’t be wondered at. They say Miss Mere- 
dith was a great beauty in her day.” 

“Yes,” said Jeffrey, “it was extraordinarily 
beautiful.” 

“ That wasn’t what you meant, though,” com- 
mented Gwendolen. 

“ No, it wasn’t,” Jeffrey admitted. “ There was 
something about it that was queer. I — I don’t be- 
lieve I can explain it any better than that. And 
that’s not explaining it at all.” 

2 9 


THE GHOST GIRL 


He fell into a little thoughtful silence and we all 
watched him curiously. I’d felt all the evening, and 
I found after he’d gone, that the others shared the 
feeling, a sense of difference in him. He seemed 
well again, but I felt perfectly sure that the thing he 
had recovered from cut a good deal deeper than a 
mere attack of nerves and had a solider cause than 
the activities of the decorators who were pulling 
down loose plaster in his studio building. 

Whatever that cause was, he didn’t mean to tell 
it. He brought back, with a little effort I would 
have sworn, his old smile and took up the conversa- 
tion again. 

“ The queerest thing about it is,” he said, “ that 
Miss Meredith herself never came to see me, nor let 
me come to see her. I wasn’t surprised when the 
arrangements for the portrait were made by a man 
who seemed to be a sort of confidential agent of hers, 
as well as her private physician — a rather charming 
chap named Crow, but when the arrangements were 
completed and I expressed a wish to talk with Miss 
Meredith herself as someone who had known the 
girl whose portrait I was to paint, and could supply 
me with some of those intimate little details, tricks 
of speech, habits of manner and so on, that'you have 
to know before you can paint a portrait. Crow 
seemed a little embarrassed and said he was afraid 
it was impossible. Miss Meredith was in a rather 
disturbed nervous state and couldn’t see anybody. 

10 


WHAT THEY FOUND IN THE ICE 

If I’d ask him the questions, or better still, write 
them out, he’d undertake to get answers for me. I 
was in two minds about chucking up the whole thing, 
but it seemed Miss Meredith was very anxious that 
I paint the portrait. And then — well, I wanted to 
paint it myself.” 

The same troubled, thoughtful look came back 
into his face with that last sentence. 

“ How did you come out with it? ” I asked. “ I 
suppose under such a handicap, it would be impos- 
sible really to satisfy her.” 

“ On the contrary,” said Jeffrey, “ she was greatly 
pleased with it. She came to the studio to see it, 
the day I went away.” 

“ Surely you saw her then,” said Jack. 

Jeffrey shook his head. “ No,” said he. “ They 
made a special arrangement to come and look at it 
while I was out. As a matter of fact, I haven’t 
been back to the studio myself since she came and 
saw it. Crow called me up at my apartment that 
evening and congratulated me on having succeeded 
so well with it.” 

He fell silent again after that and said noth- 
ing at all for a long time. At last, with a little 
sigh, and another shake of the head, he rose 
to go. 

“ I’m quite all right again,” he assured us. 
“ You’re not to worry about me.” For he saw 
plainly enough what we were thinking. “ All I need 


II 


THE GHOST GIRL 


is work, and I imagine there’s plenty of that stacked 
up ahead of me at the studio.” 

But, after he had got into his overcoat and gloves, 
he stood a moment looking at us thoughtfully, hat in 
hand, his other hand on the door-knob. 

“ You people were faced once with an insoluble 
contradiction,” he said slowly. “ A thing that must 
be true and yet couldn’t be true. Well, that’s the 
sort of problem I’ve been gnawing away at for the 
last three months. A perfect circle. You follow 
it all the way around and bring up where you began. 
I’m going to quit. I’m going back to work. Good- 
night I ” And with a nod, he was gone. 


CHAPTER II 

THE FIRST COVERT 

W HEN I walked into my office about half past 
nine the next morning, I was greeted by my 
clerk with the information that Jeffrey had been try- 
ing to get me and wanted me to call him up as soon 
as I came in. While we were talking, the ’phone 
rang and Madeline called to say that Jeffrey had 
been trying to get me at the house. So, without 
stopping to take off my overcoat or hat, I called up 
his studio. 

I heard him unhook the receiver before the bell 
had stopped ringing and knew he must have been 
waiting by the instrument for my call. The quality 
of his voice shocked me. It was harassed, uneven, 
keyed up clear to the breaking point with unnatural 
excitement. 

“ Tm awful sorry to trouble you, old man,” he 
said. “ It’s a shame to break up your work right at 
the beginning of the day, but I guess you’ll have to 
come to the rescue.” 

“ What’s the matter? ” I asked. 

“ Do you mind coming up? I can’t leave here for 
an hour or two, and I simply can’t talk over the 
’phone.” 


13 


THE GHOST GIRL 


“ I’ll be in the Subway in three minutes,” said 1. 
“ Hold hard till I get there.” 

With that I hung up, told my clerk I probably 
shouldn’t be back that morning and started up town. 
I’d have been wise, I suppose, to put a brief in my 
pocket to read on the way up — something to keep 
me from speculating and worrying about Jeffrey’s 
case until I had some data to go on. But I doubt if 
anything could have kept my mind off him. 

Jeffrey wasn’t one of my oldest friends — not one 
of that little group of people all of us carry along in 
diminishing numbers through life from boyhood — 
people whose circumstances and relations we know 
almost instinctively; people whose world we were 
born a part of. Friends of this class we are apt to 
think we know all about. And, as far as externals 
go, we do. Really, we are likely to know very little 
indeed about their interior qualities — their soul 
machinery, and we live along side by side with them 
for years, in a state of partial, or sometimes total 
misunderstanding. 

The friendship between Jeffrey and me was the 
other sort. We were both grown-up men when we 
first laid eyes on each other and the thing that made 
our friendship was a sort of instinctive sympathy — 
a mutual ability to understand each other — that had 
carried us across all the preliminaries of mere ac- 
quaintance in one jump. 

The result of this was that, so far as externals 


THE FIRST COVERT 


went, we knew relatively little about each other. It 
had never seemed worth while to stop to tell, when 
there were so many more important and interesting 
things to talk about. Jeffrey, I was sure, couldn’t 
have furnished a would-be biographer with any con- 
nected account of my experience previous to our 
meeting three or four years ago, and I was in the 
same case with him. 

I knew he was a brilliantly successful portrait 
painter; I knew, in a fragmentary way, that as a 
very young man, he had supported himself as a news- 
paper artist. I knew he had a perfectly enormous 
list of casual acquaintances — people from every 
walk of life, way down to the very lowest stratum of 
the underworld. 

I have described him heretofore as a man of pure 
genius — a man who relied, further than anyone else 
I have ever known, on a queer set of intuitions that 
seemed to begin where ordinary logical processes of 
thought left off. He claimed, you may remember, a 
special extra sense for crime; said he could detect 
crime on a man’s soul as easily as I could detect 
whisky on his breath. It was a perfectly unbe- 
lievable claim, of course, and I should have 
treated it as fanciful, except for the uncanny 
demonstration of it which he had given in 
our own mystery — the mystery of Doctor Marshall 
and the Whispering Man. Jeffrey had solved that 
and had done it, so far as any of us could see, by 

15 


THE GHOST GIRL 


the exercise of this same sheer intuition, which he 
claimed. Either by that, or by the blindest luck in 
the world. And, in doing so, he had saved Gwen- 
dolen’s life. 

In a word, I knew the man himself as intimately, 
perhaps, as I knew anyone in the world, except 
Madeline. But, about his history, I knew nothing. 
I couldn’t even have sworn that he had no brothers 
or sisters, though I had never heard of any. A per- 
fect stranger might have come up to me and told me 
any sort of weird or tragic adventures as having 
belonged to Jeffrey’s past somewhere, and I couldn’t 
have contradicted him. 

I did know this though; he was the sort of per- 
son adventures happen to — imaginative, possessed 
occasionally by powerful impulses ; full of that 
strange quality we call, for lack of a better word. 
Temperament. Given the right combination of cir- 
cumstances and the right incentive, and Jeffrey might 
have done almost anything. 

So I will have to confess that as I rode up 
town on my way to his studio, knowing only that he 
was in some sudden, unexpected difficulty, my 
thoughts ran riot. I conjectured a whole chamber 
of horrors about him, terrible hands reaching out of 
that blank past of his and snatching at him. I’d 
have said, when I knocked at his studio door, that 
nothing I could find on the other side of it would 
surprise me. 


i6 


THE FIRST COVERT 

But what I did find did surprise me, and that was 
nothing. Nothing out of the ordinary, I mean. 
There was no veiled lady in black, looming tragic- 
ally in a dark corner; no mysterious communication; 
no spot — oh, I had been ready for anything ! — of 
blood on the studio floor. Simply everything as I 
had always seen it and Jeffrey himself — quite his 
old self, smiling apologetically and holding out his 
hand to me. 

‘‘ I telephoned you not to come,” he said, “ but 
you had already started. I was too late. I’m 
dreadfully sorry. There’s nothing the matter — 
nothing that an hour or two won’t set right. And I 
really don’t need you a bit. Only, if you’ve got the 
leisure. I’d be awfully glad to have you stay.” 

“Well, but what was it?” I gasped. “What 
did you think it was? ” 

Jeffrey didn’t answer for a second or two. 

“ You remember that portrait I was telling 
you about last night?” he asked. “The thing 
I painted from a photograph for — for Miss Mere- 
dith?” 

I nodded, but Jeffrey wasn’t looking at me, so after 
a moment of silence, I said “ Yes.” 

He brought himself up with a little start. “ Well, 
when I came to the studio this morning, I found it 
gone. I thought at first that Miss Meredith might 
have taken it with her the day she came to the studio 
to look at it — I haven’t been back in the place since 

17 


THE GHOST GIRL 


then, you know. Of course that would have been 
an awfully funny thing for her to do, but she’s ec- 
centric they say, so I asked my Jap boy about it. 
He said no, that didn’t happen. They went away 
and left it just as it was on the easel. So it was per- 
fectly plain that the thing had been stolen. 

“ It seemed such a queer, inexplicable thing for 
anyone to steal, that I was — a little bit upset about 
it. So I called on you for First Aid, as I am afraid I 
have got the bad habit of doing. But afterward I 
got a clew that suggested a perfectly plain explana- 
tion. I think I’ll have the thing back before noon. 
It’s all right, you see. I’m frightfully ashamed of 
myself for having troubled you with it.” 

Still he wasn’t looking at me and I stared at his 
inexpressive back in perfectly blank amazement. 
Amazement that had. I’ll admit, a little flavor of in- 
dignation in it. 

He had given me a very bad quarter of an hour 
and his explanation of it seemed absolutely childish. 
Was the loss of a portrait — a thing that couldn’t 
mean more than two weeks’ work to his facile brush, 
an adequate explanation for that broken cry of dis- 
tress I had heard over the telephone? The thing 
was preposterous ! 

Then I remembered his manner at the house last 
night; the little shiver with which he had spoken of 
dead faces and how they were getting on his nerves; 
the impatient jerk of his head that had accompanied 

i8 


THE FIRST COVERT 


Jack’s jocular remark about a spirit portrait, and last 
of all, the thing he had said just as he was going out 
the door, about the irreconcilable contradiction that 
had been confronting him for months — the thing 
that must be true, yet couldn’t be true. 

After all, the thing that gave me the privilege of 
being called his friend, was my ability to understand 
and make allowances. Somehow or other, he had 
had a bad quarter of an hour himself that morning. 
Perhaps in some queer way I couldn’t guess at, the 
discovery of his loss had brought up the old contra- 
diction to stare him in the face — had given him a 
moment of almost superstitious panic, which, now 
that a rational explanation had suggested itself as an 
alternative, he didn’t feel like acknowledging the ex- 
istence of, even to me. 

I went over to him and laid a hand on his shoulder. 
‘‘ All right,” I said, “ let’s find it. I’m sure I 
haven’t anything better to do and if there turns out 
to be anything else you want to tell me about it later, 
why you can tell it and be sure that I shall try to 
understand. Come ! Let’s get down to business. 
What is your clue? ” 

“ It’s almost childishly simple,” said Jeffrey. 
“ I’m ashamed of myself that I didn’t think of it the 
moment I discovered the loss, instead of blowing up 
that way. Why, you’ll think of it yourself in a min- 
ute. And here’s your chance ! ” he added, as a 
knock at the door interrupted us. 

19 


THE GHOST GIRL 

His Jap was out somewhere, so Jeffrey answered 
it himself. 

“ How do you do, Mr. Peterson,” he said, and 
ushered the stranger in. 

Peterson was a clumsy looking man of the 
“skilled mechanic” type; warmly and comfortably 
and properly dressed enough, but his clothes looking 
as if he were in the habit of getting down on his 
hands and knees and carrying heavy objects around 
in his pockets. 

“ Mr. Peterson,” said Jeffrey, “ is the decorator 
who did over the building last Fall.” Then he 
astonished me by turning to Peterson and saying: 
“ Pm thinking of having a little more work done. 
Oh, this is perfectly satisfactory and I wouldn’t think 
of calling in the landlord. It’s on my own account 
entirely. Don’t you think yourself. Drew,” he 
turned to me, “ that the walls would compose into 
better looking panels, if we had a second frieze car- 
ried around there about a third of the way down? ” 

“ I don’t know anything about art or composi- 
tion,” said I. “You certainly know that. You 
will have to decide that for yourself.” 

It was too ridiculous. Here was Jeffrey who had 
run away for a two months’ vacation because the 
decorators got on his nerves, deliberately invoking 
them again, when he got back. Naturally enough, 
Peterson favored the project. 

“That’s, very well done,” said Jeffrey, “ — the 
20 


THE FIRST COVERT 


upper frieze. It’s very skilled work, you know. 
Has to be done by hand.” Then he turned back to 
Peterson. “ I’d want the same man to do it that 
did the other.” 

Peterson shook his head. “ I can’t accommodate 
you there, I’m afraid, sir. I had to turn that fellow 
off. Oh, he was a good workman, but rules are 
rules.” 

“ He came on the job drunk, I suppose,” said Jeff- 
rey. 

“ No,” said Peterson, he was steady enough. 
Why, I don’t mind telling you, though it seems 
rather hard, I turned him off because his wages were 
garnisheed by a Loan Office. You can’t get skilled 
work out of men with that on their minds.” 

“ I see,” said Jeffrey. “ But you think you could 
find me someone else just as good?” 

“ Oh, yes,” said Peterson. “ No trouble about 
that.” 

“ Well,” said Jeffrey, “ I’ll let you know. Call 
you up in the morning when I’ve made up my mind. 
Thank you very much for coming.” 

Peterson had opened the door and was in the act 
of starting out, Jeffrey watching him absent-mind- 
edly, a frown on his face. 

“ Poor devil,” he said, under his breath. Then 
suddenly struck with an idea, he called out. “ Oh, 
Peterson. Give me that chap’s address, will you — 
the one you discharged. I’m supposed to belong to 
21 


THE GHOST GIRL 


some sort of protective league for that Loan Shark 
business. Maybe we could do something to help 
him out.” 

Peterson hesitated a minute, then took a shabby 
notebook out of his pocket and read out the name 
and the address of the man he had discharged. 

Jeffrey wrote it in charcoal on the back of a 
stretcher. “ All right,” he said. “ You’ll hear 
from me in the morning.” 

Jeffrey shut the door and the next minute he was 
struggling into his overcoat. “ Come along,” said 
he. 

“Where?” I asked . 

He looked at me queerly. “ Why to look up the 
the case of this Loan Shark victim, of course. No 
time like the present. Come along.” 

In another three minutes we were in a taxi. Jeff- 
rey’s manners were always excellent, but he had a 
way of letting you know when he didn’t want to 
talk. 

The address was way up town on the East side 
and our taxi stopped at last in front of a dingy brick 
house, one of a long row, on a shabby cross-tov/n 
street. Just as we were going to ring the bell, the 
door opened and a man started out. He eyed us 
with a quick little glance of morose, surly suspicion. 

“ Oh, Mr. Shean,” said Jeffrey, pleasantly. 
“ Glad we didn’t miss you. Come back in here, a 
minute. I want to talk to you.” 

22 


THE FIRST COVERT 

If we had asked him if his name was Shean, I 
think he’d have denied it and gone on. But there 
was a mixture of authority and confidence behind 
Jeffrey’s good-natured smile, that was almost irre- 
sistible. The man hesitated, and having done that 
much, seemed to find it impossible to do anything 
but obey Jeffrey’s gesture and follow us into the 
badly lighted, ill-smelling hall. Here Jeffrey 
stepped back and nodded to him to lead the way. 

“ What do you want? ” Shean demanded. 

“ A chance to talk to you for a moment without 
interruption,” said Jeffrey pleasantly. 

The man grunted and led the way to a small room 
at the back of the house. 

Jeffrey, the last one into it, closed the door after 
him and nodded toward a chair. “ Sit down a min- 
ute,” he said. He waited till Shean had obeyed 
him and I, rather cautiously, had followed suit. I 
didn’t like the man’s looks altogether. 

Jeffrey leaned back comfortably against the top 
of a trunk. 

“ We work at the same trade,” he said, politely. 
“ I’m a painter myself. My name’s Arthur Jeffrey, 
and I’ve got a studio up on Central Park West.” 

The man started out of his chair and then let him- 
self drop back into it. 

“ Well,” he said savagely, “ what do you want? ” 

“ Oh, it’s nothing to get excited about,” said 
Jeffrey. “ I suppose you got twenty-five or thirty 


THE GHOST GIRE 


dollars for the frame. You probably needed that 
more than I do. But I need the picture that was in 
it more than you do. So I want you to give it back 
to me.” 

Shean was on his feet by now and the blustering, 
furtive terror in his face and in his voice when he 
spoke, were confession enough to me that my 
friend’s shot had rung the bell. 

“ You’re a liar,” said Shean. “ A damned liar. 
You don’t know what you’re talking about.” 

“ I’m talking,” said Jeffrey, “ about a picture of 
a girl in a white satin gown. It was in my studio 
in a French, hand-carved frame. You were at work 
painting that frieze in my studio. You know what 
that frame was worth and where you could sell it. 
You knew I was off on a two months’ vacation and 
you absolutely had to have the money. Lord, man, 
I know what that means myself. I never took that 
means of getting it, but I can understand how a man 
would. But you couldn’t sell the picture. That’s 
preposterous! And I want you to give it back to 
me. 

Shean was staring at him fascinated. There was 
a long silence. Finally, he spoke through his locked 
teeth. 

“ I didn’t take any picture. I swear to God I 
didn’t take any picture. The frame was empty 
when I saw it there. I did take the frame and I 
sold it. I got eighteen dollars for it, and I knew 
24 


THE FIRST COVERT 

it was worth a hundred and twenty. Eighteen dol- 
lars to give to those damned leeches that are suck- 
ing all the blood out of me. You can prosecute, 
and be damned. I wish you would. But I didn’t 
take any picture.” 

For a full minute, I think it must have been, 
Jeffrey sat there on the trunk staring at him without 
a word, in his eyes a look almost of panic. Then he 
rose and held out his hand to Shean. 

“ Thank you for telling me the truth about it,” 
he said. “ Oh, yes, I know it’s true. I’m sorry for 
you. If you’ll come up to my place and see me 
some day, — oh, any time, we’ll talk things over and 
see what we can do. Oh, and if you know where 
the frame is, find out what I can buy it back for, 
will you? No, I don’t want any thanks. Good- 
by! ” 

In two minutes we were back in the taxi. I 
wanted to ask him what had given him the clue for 
what seemed to me an uncannily lucky guess, but his 
manner made it plain he didn’t want to talk, so I 
left his moody revery undisturbed all the way back 
to the studio. He sprang out, when we arrived 
there, with unconcealed haste, and fretted over the 
slowness of the elevator as we were going up. 

His Jap heard us coming and was holding the 
door open for us. 

“ Togo,” said Jeffrey, “ did you take that por- 
trait I left when I went away, out of the frame? ” 
3 25 


THE GHOST GIRL 


Togo nodded and smiled. “ Yes, I took out. 
Put there.” He nodded toward a big unframed 
stretcher on the outside of the stack that was leaning 
against the wall. “ That it,” he concluded. 

Jeffrey burst into a laugh. “ Well, why the devil 
didn’t you say so?” he demanded, — “when I was 
making all that fuss this morning? ” 

Togo shook his head and lifted his eyebrows. 
“ Frame gone,” he said. “ I not know.” 

Jeffrey strode across the room and swung the big 
stretcher around. Then he made a queer noise in 
his throat. There was no portrait there. It was 
just a big, gray, blank canvas, without a brushful of 
paint on it. We looked through the others in the 
stack. We looked at every canvas in the studio. 
But the portrait of the girl in the white satin gown 
wasn’t there. 


CHAPTER III 

THE UNSEEN VISITOR 

J EFFREY’S part of the search was a mere 
pretense. Togo and I looked everywhere — 
down in the studio and up in the loft. But, for the 
greater part of the time, Jeffrey sat in his chair 
staring dully out of the window and getting whiter 
and whiter every minute. When I had satisfied my- 
self that we had really exhausted the possibilities 
and that the portrait of the girl in the white satin 
gown was really nowhere in the studio, I dismissed 
Togo with a nod, went up behind Jeffrey and laid 
my hand on his shoulder. 

I didn’t intend to take him by surprise. He’d 
have heard me coming, had he not been sunk so far 
in the very deepest abstraction. As it was, he gave 
a little shudder under my touch and fainted dead 
away. I laid him on the floor and loosened his 
collar. But finally I had to get some cold water 
and dash it in his face in order to bring him to. 
Then I gathered him up, and with a little help from* 
himself, got him safely ensconced in his big deep 
Morris chair. 

“ I’m sorry I made such a fool of myself,” he said 
limply. 


27 


THE GHOST GIRL 


I don’t know why it is that people apologize for 
fainting, but they always do. 

“ Forget about it,” said 1. “ You were in worse 

shape than I realized when you went away two 
months ago. If I’d known how bad you were I 
think I’d have gone with you. And you’re not 
quite right yet. Madeline and I will figure: out, in a 
little while, what’s best for you to- do. In the mean- 
time, you stop worrying. As I said, forget it.” 

Jeffrey laughed. It wasn’t a pleasant laugh to 
hear. 

“ Forget it! ” he echoed. “ Stop worrying.” 

“ Or else,” said I, struck with a new idea, “ tell 
me all about it. I imagine that will be better after 
all.” 

“ It’s nothing but a nightmare,” said Jeffrey. 
“ That’s all it can possibly be.” 

“ Exactly,” I said. “ And the only way to wake 
yourself out of a nightmare, is to bring it out in 
the daylight. Reduce it to cold facts. Tell it, no 
matter how it sounds. I’ve none of your imagina- 
tion, nor any of those wonderful intuitions of yours, 
but I do lay claim to a certain amount of common 
sense, and perhaps I may be able to help you.” 

“Will you promise,” Jeffrey asked, “to believe 
what I tell you? Oh, I don’t mean to ask you not 
to think me a deliberate liar,” he went on, inter- 
preting my look of surprise at his request. “ I 
mean, will you promise to regard me as a sane per- 
28 


THE UNSEEN VISITOR 


son recounting observed facts ? Promise when I have 
got through, not to come over and pat me on the 
back and tell me what I need is hypophosphites and 
strychnine. I’m not a wobbly neurasthenic suffer- 
ing from hallucinations. If my story sounds like 
a bunch of phonograph records from bedlam, you’re 
to promise to believe it’s the story’s fault, not mine.” 

If I felt an uncanny sort of excitement over his 
prologue, I did my best not to show it. I loaded 
and lighted my pipe pretty deliberately before I 
answered, and if the hand that held the match shook 
a little, I hoped he wouldn’t notice it. 

“ All right,” said I. “ Fire away.” 

“ Do you remember,” he began, “ that two years 
ago I spent the winter in Paris? ” 

“ Remember! ” I exclaimed. “ Didn’t Madeline 
and I visit you a whole week in your apartment 
there? ” 

“ Did either you or Madeline notice anything 
queer about me then or did anything happen that 
you wondered about? ” 

I hesitated a little over my answer. I might as 
well have spoken out, for he noticed the little change 
in my manner instantly. 

“ I see you did.” 

“ Why, really it was nothing,” said I. “ You 
may remember the incident yourself. We all came 
into the studio together, one afternoon, after a little 
sight-seeing expedition, and we saw lying in the 
29 


THE GHOST GIRL 


middle of the floor, a woman’s handkerchief. Both 
Madeline and I naturally supposed it was hers. I 
went over toward it to pick it up, but you saw it just 
then, picked it up yourself, glanced at it, and slipped 
it in your pocket. It struck us both as a little queer. 
Not what you did, but the way you did it. As if, 
somehow, you didn’t want to be questioned. Evi- 
dently you knew the handkerchief wasn’t Madeline’s 
and you seemed a little embarrassed at finding it 
there. We had all been off together, so that who- 
ever dropped it must have been there in the studio 
while we were out.” 

I stopped there rather awkwardly, but Jeffrey, 
with a little movement of impatience, told me to 
go on. 

“What did you think about it?” he asked. 
“ How did you explain it? Oh, if I’m going to be 
frank, you must be.” 

“ Why, we both remembered,” said I, feeling for 
my words a little lamely, “ that you hadn’t originally 
planned to go with us that afternoon. So it seemed 
to us that the owner of the handkerchief must have 
icome in. . . . Well, must have been enough 

at home there to get in when there was no one there 
to receive her, and waited for you a while and then 
gone away.” 

“ And you made, I suppose, the conventional ex- 
planation,” said Jeffrey. “ Certainly you couldn’t 
have been expected to make any other; especially 
30 


THE UNSEEN VISITOR 

when I put the handkerchief in my pocket that way 
and seemed not to want to talk about it. But it 
wasn’t the right explanation, Drew.” 

“ I’m not a Puritan,” said I, “ but, somehow, I’m 
glad to hear that. We both felt a little uncom- 
fortable about it, though we’ve never discussed it 
since. Your manner seemed a little different after it 
too. I suppose that was because you guessed what 
we must be thinking.” 

“ No,” said Jeffrey, “ I never thought of it that 
way until this morning. But I’ll have to go back 
and begin at the beginning. 

“You know I thought I was awfully lucky to get 
that studio in the first place. There isn’t a better one 
in Paris. The man who had it — he’s a prosperous, 
well known painter — had a long lease on it and a 
lot of work to do, and it never occurred to me, when 
I asked him if he knew where I could get a studio, 
that there was any possibility of his giving up his. 
But he offered it to me, in a hesitating sort of way, 
saying that he meant to find another and thought he 
could get one the other side of the empasse. I 
asked him why in the world he was moving out of 
that one to go into one not so good, across the street, 
and all he said at first was that he’d taken a dis- 
like to it. It had got on his nerves and he couldn’t 
paint there. I wanted to know what had got on his 
nerves and he wouldn’t tell me. 

I wouldn’t offer it to anyone else,’ he said at 
31 


U ( 


THE GHOST GIRL 


last, ‘ but you’re such a sensible chap that maybe 
you won’t mind.’ 

“ ‘ Mind what? ’ I asked him again, but still he 
wouldn’t tell me. 

“ ‘ It’s ten to one, a hundred to one, there won’t 
be anything.’ 

“ That was all he would say. He was a cranky, 
temperamental sort of cuss, so I didn’t think any 
more about it. Blessed my good luck and moved 
in. I didn’t find anything for about a week.” 

“ And then? ” I asked. I tried to say the words 
casually, but it wasn’t easy. 

“ Get the geography of the place well in your 
mind first,” he said. “ You remember there was a 
little hall with a kitchenette to the right of it. And 
then the salon and two bedrooms straight along in a 
row, with a corridor on the inside. When you get to 
the end of the corridor, you turn to the left and come 
out in the loft of the studio. The studio floor is a 
half story down, by a flight of steps. There is a 
door at the other end of the studio that is reached by 
a flight of iron steps outside, so that models and 
such can come straight to the studio through the 
court without coming into the apartment.” 

“ Yes,” said I, “ I’ve got it straight. I remem- 
bered it pretty well anyway. Go on.” 

“ And you understand, don’t you,” he continued, 
“ that there’s another apartment and studio on the 
other side of the court exactly corresponding to mine, 
32 


THE UNSEEN VISITOR 


only left-handed. The end walls of the studios 
come together and the same flight of iron stairs 
serves both studio doors. That’s clear, isn’t it? ” 

I nodded. “ Go on,” said 1. “ What did you 

find at the end of a week? ” 

Jeffrey shrugged his shoulders. “ Nothing,” 
he said, “ nothing that I can tell about even to you, 
without feeling rather an ass. Why, I came in just 
about four o’clock one afternoon in November. It 
was dark of course. Let myself in by the apart- 
ment door — not the studio door, you understand. 
Let myself in with my latchkey and lit the gas in 
the hall. The minute I did it, I knew that someone 
else had just been there. I knew that whoever it 
was, was in the next room — the salon. Mind you, 
I didn’t see anything nor hear anything. I just 
knew it. Now there’s nothing uncanny about that. 
I’ve got some sort of extra sense that often tells 
me those things, when the people in question are 
just ordinary, everyday, living people. I call it an 
extra sense. Perhaps it’s actually only an abnormal 
sense of smell, but too subtle to recognize as such. 

“ As you know, I didn’t keep any servant that 
winter. I had an old femme de menage who came 
every morning to clean up and then went away. 
She hadn’t any business there in the afternoon, but 
still she could have got in. She had a key and she 
might perfectly well have come back when she 
thought I’d be out — oh, to steal a few candles, or 
33 


THE GHOST GIRL 


a basket of coal or something. They all do that. 
So It didn’t startle me at all or give me any queer 
sensations to know that there was someone In the 
place. 

“ I took off my hat and overcoat after I’d lighted 
the gas, and went Into the salon. Well, there was 
no one there. But the same sense told me that who- 
ever it was had gone on Into the adjoining room. 
That seemed queer, because I ought to have heard 
her moving about. But I struck another match and 
went on. There was no one there either, but I fol- 
lowed what I can only call the scent, which was just 
as definite, real a thing, as what a hound follows the 
trail by, out Into the corridor and down to the turn- 
ing and Into the loft and down across the studio 
to the outside studio door. And I was just as sure, 
when I got to that door, that someone had gone out 
of It less than half a minute before, as I was when I 
came In that there was someone there.” 

“ You heard nothing all the while? ” I asked. 

“ Not a sound,” he said, “ except the noise I was 
making myself, and that wasn’t much.” 

“ And you saw nothing? ” 

“ No,” said Jeffrey. 

Well, I suppose you will think he was right about 
It. That It did sound silly; that It was a confession 
even a nervous, fidgety woman would have been al- 
most ashamed to make, and you may think that if 
I had been the common-sense, level-headed friend I 
34 


THE UNSEEN VISITOR 

professed to be, I should have told him that his ex- 
perience was nothing more than an attack of the 
creeps and that he was a fool to think twice about it. 
I d have done that if I could. But the fact was I 
couldn’t. To begin with, I knew that what Jeffrey 
said about his possession of an extra sense was the 
sober, literal truth. I would trust that sense of his 
as far as I would trust one of the regular five senses 
in a normal man. When he said he knew, in that 
inexplicable way, that someone was in the salon 
when he opened the hall door, it meant as much to 
me as if another had said — “ I saw someone stand- 
ing there.” Granting that, and I had to grant it, 
the thing became a very curious mystery. 

“You didn’t miss anything?” I asked. “Noth- 
ing had been taken? ” 

Jeffrey shook his head. “ The trouble is,” he 
went on, “ with the possession of a sense like that, 
you never can really believe in it yourself. You 
may know you have it, you may be utterly unable to 
disbelieve you have it, but your common sense won’t 
accept an unsupported report of it. It insists on tell- 
ing you that you are a fool with a head full of fancies 
and it not only prevents you from telling other peo- 
ple about it, it won’t let you take ordinary, common- 
sense means for solving the mystery. 

“ I thought about the thing for a week. It didn’t 
happen again in that time and I had about persuaded 
myself there was nothing to it but imagination. 

35 


THE GHOST GIRL 


Then one evening when I was coming home from the 
restaurant where I’d dined, I saw a light in my studio. 
My first thought was to go straight up to the studio 
door by the iron stair. Then I recollected that the 
sound of anyone coming up that stair was perfectly 
audible in the studio from the moment you set foot 
on the lowest step. It was a spiral stair and you 
couldn’t go up very fast. Whoever was in the 
studio would have ample warning I was coming and 
plenty of time to get out through the apartment while 
I was letting myself in the other way. 

“ So I went up the other stairs, as softly as I could, 
had my key ready, flung the door open and rushed 
down the corridor to the loft. As I turned the 
corner, I heard the studio door shut. The studio 
was daric when I got into it, but one of the candles 
had just been put out. I could smell it. I scram- 
bled up on the back of a big Breton settle from which 
I could see out of the studio light into the court. I 
am perfectly sure that I was up there looking out of 
the window before anyone who had just shut my 
studio door, could have had time to get down the 
iron stairs and across the court. There wasn’t any 
other way out. The court wasn’t dark, for the two 
hallways were well lighted and there was another 
bright light in the arched entrance to the court from 
the street. Well, I looked and looked, but that 
court was deserted.” 


CHAPTER IV 

WHAT JEFFREY SAW 

I DIDN’T wait for anything more. I went 
straight out and questioned the concierge. 
Asked him if anyone had come in inquiring for me, 
or if anyone had just gone out. He said no to both 
questions. 

“ ‘ Well,’ I said, ‘ someone has been in my studio. 
There was a light burning when I came in.’ The 
imbecile asked me if I hadn’t left the light there my- 
self. I said no, that I had gone away at noon, and 
besides, the light was out when I got to the studio. 
‘ Then,’ said he, ‘ possibly what monsieur saw was a 
reflection.’ 

“ I told him a reflection didn’t leave a smell of 
hot tallow behind it. At that he shrugged his 
shoulders and suggested I report my losses to the 
police. 

“ ‘ I don’t know that I’ve lost anything,’ said I, 
and at that he gave me^^up for a maniac. 

“ I went back to the studio and found that I hadn’t 
lost anything — nothing had even been disturbed. 
But I felt perfectly sure ■ — I can’t tell you how — 
that somebody had been sitting in my big 
chair. Probably for a good while. It was clear 
37 


THE GHOST GIRL 

I’d have to solve the mystery for myself. If I 
made any complaint, or tried to provoke an official 
investigation, I’d probably bring up in the mad- 
house.” 

“Look here, Jeffrey!” I cried. “What about 
the other apartment — the one that corresponded to 
yours on the other side of the court? Didn’t you 
say that the end walls of the two studios came to- 
gether? Couldn’t she have gone. . . .?” 

“ Couldn’t who? ” said Jeffrey. 

“She — the woman that was In your studio? 
The ghost girl — whatever she was? ” 

“ That’s queer,” said Jeffrey, “ I haven’t told you 
that I thought she was a woman — a young woman 
too. But I always thought of her that way, even 
then. I even called her the ghost girl then.” 

“ There’s nothing queer about it,” said I. “ The 
handkerchief made me think of a young woman.” 

Jeffrey gave a short laugh. “ That shows what 
a fool I am,” said he. “ I was getting ready to 
build another little ghost story out of that. Go on I 
What were you going to ask? ” 

“ You said the same Iron stairs served both studio 
doors. Well then, why couldn’t she have slipped 
out of your door and Into the other one? There’d 
be time enough for that.” 

“ Because I thought of that,” said Jeffrey, “ al- 
most at once. And I suppose that’s the explanation 
that you’ll stick to when I’ve told you everything, 
38 


WHAT JEFFREY SAW 

although I don’t believe it one single minute myself. 
The people who occupied that apartment were an 
English family named Williamson. I don’t know 
so very much about him, so far as his life is con- 
cerned, but we were very pleasant acquaintances. I 
met him as soon as I took the studio. They are 
the most commonplace people in the world. 
Williamson himself is a retired English doctor’ — a 
chap in his fifties. Hard-headed, straightforward, 
thoroughly good sort. He had a wife and daughter 
there with him. They were living in Paris so she 
could study Art. She had about as much chance of 
doing anything at it as a dog has to learn to sing. 
She was a pleasant, hard-headed, young little old 
maid of about twenty. She worked very industri- 
ously in her studio and I developed my talent for fic- 
tion to the last notch thinking up things to say about 
her work when she showed it to me. 

“ Well, those three Williamsons were simply out 
of the question. That night that I saw the light in 
my studio, there was a light in theirs — they gener- 
ally spent their evenings there. I went straight 
over, told them someone had been rummaging 
around my diggings and asked if they had heard any- 
thing through the wall. They were interested, of 
course, and Mrs. Williamson got quite excited over 
the idea of robbers and wanted to know if I had 
lost anything. They had been in their studio all 
the evening! Now you can say it might have been 
39 


THE GHOST GIRL 


one of them and I can’t prove that it wasn’t, but all 
the same the notion is inconceivable.” 

“ I agree with you,” said 1. “ Go on. What 

happened next? ” 

“ There wasn’t anything very different up to the 
time you and Madeline came to visit me,” said Jeff- 
rey. “ Two or three other experiences more or less 
like the ones I have told you about. One night when 
I was in bed — I don’t know whether I was asleep 
or not — I wasn’t sleeping well then, but I waked 
up, if I had been asleep, with the idea that I had 
seen someone go by my bedroom door. I wasted 
two or three minutes, I’ll admit, lying still in a sweat- 
ing terror, trying to convince myself it had been a 
dream. And then I heard the studio door shut. I 
got up and lighted all the lights and looked around, 
but I didn’t find anything. The whole thing may 
have been a dream. But the handkerchief we found 
on the floor wasn’t a dream and I’m sure it had been 
dropped while we were out. That was the first 
tangible clue I got. The first thing that I couldn’t 
reason away on the theory of imagination when I was 
in good form. 

“ I went up one night to call on the man who’d 
rented me the studio, in the hopes of finding out 
what his experiences had been. But he was mum as 
an oyster and tried to pump me. Williamson spoke 
of it again once and asked me if I’d seen or heard 
anything more, and I told him no. I didn’t feel like 
40 


WHAT JEFFREY SAW 

showing him what an ass I was and I knew I couldn’t 
start talking about it without giving away the whole 
thing.” 

“ It’s awfully queer, of course,” I said dubiously, 
“ but. . . 

“ I haven’t begun the story yet,” said Jeffrey, 
“ the real story. But here’s where it begins. Now 
listen, and if you want to call in an alienist when I 
get through, why, go ahead. But let me tell the 
thing connectedly first. 

“ A couple of weeks after you and Madeline left 
Paris, I got a note from the Muirheads, suggesting 
that I pack up my color box and come down to 
Etaples for a few days. They were having a lovely 
time painting winter skies and things and they 
wanted to let me in on it. I was glad of an excuse 
to get away, so I went. I did those sketches I 
showed you — the only real work I’ve got to show 
for the whole rotten winter — and went back to 
Paris feeling that I’d got rid of the cobwebs. 

“ I reached the studio about two in the afternoon 
— a bright clear day. I was feeling as well — as 
little liable to any imaginative delusions — as 
it is possible to imagine anyone. I went into 
my apartment, got rid of my traps and went down 
into the studio. Now this is what I saw: One of 
my easels had been drawn out into the middle of the 
room. There was a canvas on it that had been 
painted; there was a low stool in front of it where 
4 41 


THE GHOST GIRL 


the painter had sat. To the left of it was one of my 
chairs, just an ordinary straight-backed chair, with a 
mirror of mine standing on it — an old mirror in a 
carved gilt frame, with a sort of ornamental top on 
it. All around the stool on the floor, were brushes 
and tubes of my colors. There was a palette on the 
chair leaning up against the mirror/* 

“ But, the canvas I ” I asked, for he had hesitated 
there for a moment. “ What was on the canvas? *’ 

Jeffrey got up and drew a long breath. His 
teeth were clenched as if they wanted to chatter and 
he talked through them in a sort of dogged matter- 
of-fact way. 

“ On the canvas,” he said, “ was a carefully 
painted portrait of a very beautiful young girl. 
Young — oh, I should say in her middle twenties. 
It must have taken two or three sittings — three 
anyway — of pretty fast, skillful painting, to have 
carried it as far as it was. The last of them must 
have been that very morning, because part of the 
paint on the canvas was wet. It hadn’t even dried 
on the palette. The thing was obviously a portrait 
of the painter. The outline of the rim of the pal- 
ette showed in the lower part of the canvas, but as if 
held in the right hand, as of course it always is 
when you sit down in front of the mirror and paint 
a portrait of yourself. She had even indicated the 
frame of the mirror on the canvas. It was all per- 
fectly solid and real. As I said, the thing was well 
42 


WHAT JEFFREY SAW 

painted, though not brilliantly nor trickily at all. 
An excellent, an extraordinarily talented piece of 
work. It wasn’t completed. In fact, part of the 
canvas wasn’t covered at all. It was one of my can- 
vases — a gray one like that blank I turned around 
just now.” 

“Well, you had something tangible to go on at 
last,” said I. “ What did you do? ” 

“ It was hard to decide what to do,” said Jeffrey. 
“ I didn’t go up in the air at all. The fact that I 
had something tangible was, in its way, a sort of re- 
lief. And I still think what I decided was the best 
thing I could do. And that was just to stay there in 
that studio until something happened. I made up 
my mind not to leave the room for more than thirty 
seconds, until that mysterious painter. . . .” 

He stopped and gave a shivering little laugh, 
“ The ghost girl, came back. I thought she would 
come back and that before many hours. 

“ Well, I waited; spent most of the time smoking, 
staring at the portrait. I learned it — learned every 
brush-stroke in it. I could repaint it now from 
memory. I stayed there for thirty-six hours with- 
out leaving the room but once. That time I went 
up to my kitchenette and got a box of biscuits. I 
wasn’t gone more than half a minute and everything 
was just as I had left it when I came back. But 
thirty-six hours later, that was at two in the morn- 
ing, my endurance gave out and I lay down on my 
43 


THE GHOST GIRL 


divan there in the studio for what I thought to be a 
cat-nap. I’m a light sleeper. I didn’t think it pos- 
sible for anybody to get into that room without wak- 
ing me instantly. I suppose I slept pretty hard. 
When I wakened, it was ten o’clock the next morn- 
ing.” 

“And the portrait?” I asked. 

“ The portrait was gone. The mirror, the easel, 
the stool, were all back in their places — even my 
palette and brushes were back on the table where I’d 
left them when I started for Etaples. I hadn’t a 
thing to show — no way of proving to anybody ex- 
cept myself, that I hadn’t dreamed the whole thing. 
Thank God I could prove it to myself ! The colors 
that were left on the palette were not the ones that 
had been on it when I went away. That I am ready 
to swear to, unless I’m crazy. What is your opinion 
about it? Do you want to call a taxi and take me 
up to Bellevue? You haven’t heard it all, but per- 
haps you’ve heard enough.” 

“ No. I want it all,” said I, “ everything that 
you can remember — every detail, no matter how 
irrelevant it seems to you.” 

“ I rather think,” said Jeffrey, “ that what I’ve 
told you is all, so far as the Paris mystery goes. I’m 
really satisfied that the adventure on the bridge was 
pure imagination and nothing else. In point of fact, 
it might have been a dream.” 

“ Never mind,” said I, “ I want dreams and all.” 

44 


WHAT JEFFREY SAW 

“ Why, the night before I left Paris,’’ said Jeff- 
rey, “ that was about the middle of March — a 
warm night like Spring — I hadn’t been able to sleep. 
About four o’clock in the morning, I dressed and 
went out; wandered around. It must have been 
about five when I brought up on the Pont Royale. 
The air was very thick with mist. I had on a rain- 
coat, I remember, instead of an overcoat and the 
steam in that warm air condensed and trickled down 
as if it had really been raining. It was a lovely 
sight. There was a fag-end of a moon trying to 
light up the mist and it made every smooth, horizon- 
tal surface shine like silver — the flat decks of the 
barges in the river. It was all very restful and 
still. 

“ I seemed to have the world to myself for a few 
minutes, but very soon a woman came along, stopped 
and leaned against the rail close beside me. I sup- 
posed she was someone who had marked me as pos- 
sible game and had been following along, waiting for 
a good chance to speak to me. I was about to move 
away, when I noticed that she seemed perfectly un- 
conscious of my presence. I couldn’t see her face 
at all, just a shape. She was all wrapped up in one 
of those rain-proof cloaks with a hood, and the hood 
pulled up over her head. She stayed there a long 
time staring down at the river and the boats, just 
as I had been doing before she came. The funny 
thing was that her being there made me uncomfort- 
45 


THE GHOST GIRL 


able. It was a little bit like a nightmare — per- 
haps it was really a nightmare. Because I wanted 
to go away and I couldn’t. I didn’t want to speak 
to her and yet it seemed that I must. 

“ Presently I heard footsteps and that seemed to 
break the spell a little. They were coming from 
behind me, so I turned to look. They were a couple 
of gendarmes tramping along on their route. I 
heard a little movement beside me and turned to 
look at the girl. The sound had attracted her at- 
tention too. She was looking in my direction, but 
wasn’t looking at me at all — just in the direction of 
the sound, and the hood had fallen back from her 
head and — well, she was the girl of the portrait, the 
ghost girl. And I felt then as if I’d known it was 
she from the moment I saw her standing there. 
She didn’t make a sound, but her eyes widened a lit- 
tle as the gendarmes came nearer and she turned 
and fled away and vanished in the mist. When they 
came opposite me, they slowed down and looked at 
me a bit curiously and passed on. They didn’t pay 
any attention to the girl. I suppose the explanation 
is that I fell asleep there on the bridge and dreamed 
about the girl, as I often did dream about her, and 
that the coming of the gendarmes waked me up.” 

“ Well,” said I, “ let us be thankful for a reason- 
able explanation where we can get one. Undoubt- 
edly that is the explanation in this case.” 

Jeffrey drew a long unsteady breath. “ 

46 


I wish I 


WHAT JEFFREY SAW 

could say ‘ undoubtedly ’ in that tone of voice about 
anything. Drew, people can talk all they like about 
the tortures of the Inquisition and so on, but the 
most exquisite torture in the world is a doubt about 
the validity of your own observations. That’s the 
thing that’s driving me — pretty near crazy. I can’t 
trust my own sense any more.” 

“ Don’t exaggerate,” I said sharply. “ I don’t 
doubt anything that you have reported to me. I 
can’t explain it. I’ll agree. But there is an explana- 
tion. We may find it out some day, or we may 
never find it out. But the thing really happened. 
I’m going to stick to that and I want you to.” 

‘‘ I don’t know,” he said. “ I haven’t told you 
yet. I’ve been afraid to tell you. Because, when I 
tell you, you won’t believe any more than I do. 
Listen to this! Dr. Crow comes around and ar- 
ranges for me to paint a portrait for Miss Meredith 
from a photograph — a photograph of a girl who’s 
dead, and he takes the photograph out of its paper 
wrapping and shows it to me. And what do you 
suppose I see there? Whose face, Drew? Guess 
— guess whose face that was.” 

I stared at him and my own dry throat could 
hardly utter the question — the wild, fantastic ques- 
tion his words suggested. 

“Not . . . Not . . .?” I whispered. 

He nodded. “ The same face. The very same 
face that I had seen on the bridge, that I’d found 
47 


THE GHOST GIRL 


painted during my absence there in my studio — the 
face that had been reflected in my old mirror while 
the sitter herself painted it.’’ He stood up and thrust 
out his hands at me with a kind of feverish energy. 
“ Do you believe me now? Haven’t you any mis- 
givings yourself? Haven’t you got right now in the 
back of your head the idea that you’ll run around and 
talk to Pritchard or Foster, or some other of those 
big nerve and insanity specialists? ” 

That shot of his came uncannily near the mark, 
but I thrust the misgiving out of my mind as soon 
as it showed itself there. 

“ Not a bit of it,” said I. “ But you will be a 
patient for one of those fellows if you let yourself go 
like this. Look here! You painted the portrait 
from that photograph, didn’t you? You could see 
straight enough to put it on canvas and to satisfy 
Miss Meredith with the result.” 

“ Oh, my eyes and hands are all right,” said Jeff- 
rey. “ If there’s a kink anywhere, it’s farther in- 
side than that.” 

“ You say it was Miss Meredith’s niece you 
painted a portrait of? How recent was the photo- 
graph?” 

Jeffrey gave a laugh that was half a shiver. 
“ Well, that’s the last question,” he said. “ That 
brings out the whole tale. The photograph. Drew, 
was taken in Paris four years ago. It was three 
years ^go that the girl died. She died in Paris of 
48 


WHAT JEFFREY SAW 

small-pox — during the epidemic three years ago. 
And, well — you can verify the other date your- 
self. It was two years ago that you and Madeline 
visited Paris, wasn’t it? You’re quite sure of 
that?” 

There was a ring at the door just then and we 
heard Togo, the Jap, admitting someone into the 
ante-room. 


CHAPTER V 

THE JADE EARRING 


HEN Togo opened the studio door, Jeffrey 



vv summoned him in with a nod and with a ges- 
ture told him to shut the door after him. 

“ I can’t see anybody to-day,” he said. “ There’s 
no telling what sort of a fool I’ll make of myself.” 
Then he turned to Togo. “ Who is it, Togo? ” 

‘‘ He Doctor Crow,” said Togo. “ He come one 
time before this morning. You out. He wait. Go 
way. Come back. Here now.” 

“ I won’t see him,” said Jeffrey. “ That’s all 
there is about it.” 

“ If he’s already been here once,” said I, “ he’s 
probably got something important to say and if Togo 
sends him away, he’ll come back a little later.” 

“ Look here I ” said Jeffrey. “ You see him your- 
self. Find out what he wants. If he asks to see 
the picture, you can tell him you don’t know where 
it is. Tell him I’ve been having trouble with the 
frame — anything you like, but get rid of him for 
two or three days. If you’re right about it, if I’m 
not crazy, if the picture’s just been stolen in an ordi- 
nary, human way and from ordinary human motives, 
we can probably get it back. Maybe we sha’n’t have 


THE JADE EARRING 

to let the old lady know it ever was lost. Anyhow, 
tell him some cock and bull story that will keep him 
quiet for a while. While you’re doing that, I’ll 
go down and see my friend Richards of Police Head- 
quarters.” 

‘ I thought you hadn’t much opinion of the police 
when it came to detective work,” said I. 

“ No more I have,” was Jeffrey’s answer. “ But 
an ordinary theft doesn’t call for detective work. 
The police know who the thieves are, they know the 
fences and what particular sort of fence makes a 
specialty of a particular sort of stolen property. 
And if it’s a case where they are really interested, 
they go and get it and bring it back. I’ve done 
Richards many a good turn before now in my old 
newspaper days, and I’ve an idea he’ll do what he can 
for me.” 

He was struggling into his overcoat before he had 
finished speaking, and at the end he moved toward 
the door that led out into the corridor. On reach- 
ing the door, he stopped impulsively and came back 
to me. 

I don’t know, old man,” he said, “ whether 
you’re the greatest liar in the world or not. But 
you’re a good Samaritan anyway. If you’d taken 
my story the way anybody could have been expected 
to take it and if you’d said any of the ordinary, so- 
called comforting things about nerves and overwork 
and so on, I don’t know what I’d have done.” 

51 


THE GHOST GIRL 


“ I haven’t done much yet,” said I. “ But It’s my 
affair now as much as It is yours. We’ll see it out 
together.” 

He caught my hand In a grip that fairly hurt. 
“ Stay here till I come back,” he said, as he turned 
again toward the door. “ I’ll ring when I come 
and find out from Togo If the Doctor’s gone. If 
he hasn’t. I’ll wait In the ante-room. You show him 
out this way.” 

“ All right,” said I, and the next moment I heard 
his footsteps echoing down the hall. 

It wasn’t until I’d directed Togo to show Doctor 
Crow Into the study, that I realized I had no excuse 
to give for being there, or for asking his business on 
Jeffrey’s behalf. But a lawyer Is always in need of 
explanations for things and I have found an excellent 
expedient, when all others fail, in telling the simple 
truth. It’s apt to be quite as misleading, provided 
you really want to mislead anybody, as the most in- 
genious fiction. 

Doctor Crow came in In a quick eager sort of way, 
looked around the room for Jeffrey, and then, seeing 
that I was the only person there, stopped, hesitated 
and then spoke In a tone obviously puzzled. 

“I — I want to speak to Mr. Jeffrey,” he said. 
“ I — understood his man to tell me he was here. 
Indeed, I thought I heard his voice.” 

“ He was here,” said I. “ He went out only this 
moment.” 


52 


THE JADE EARRING 

“ That’s singular,” said the Doctor. “ Didn’t 
his man say I wanted to see him? ” 

“ Yes,” said 1. “ But I’d noticed before that he 

seemed rather upset. And, on hearing that he had 
another visitor, he said abruptly that he could see no 
one, asked me to stay and see you, and bolted. I 
suppose his parting injunction entitles me to ask if 
I can be of any service to you. I’ll try to do any- 
thing you ask me to, except explain Mr. Jeffrey’s de- 
parture. I’m afraid that’s beyond me.” 

While I talked, I was recalling to mind Jeffrey’s 
description of the man, that he had given us 
the night before, the rather charming young 
doctor who had arranged for the portrait between 
him and Miss Meredith. He fully justified Jef- 
frey’s adjective. A good looking young chap — 
dark, slender, very bright eyed. His smile came 
quickly, when he wanted it — almost too quickly, so 
that it reminded me a little of switching on the elec- 
tric light. 

“ The advantage of being an artist,” he said 
amiably, “ is that one doesn’t have to explain things 
like that. Temperament will cover anything — in 
the case of as gifted a man as Jeffrey, anything he 
could possibly take it into his head to do.” 

Illogically enough, I resented this a little and felt 
an inclination to justify my friend’s action by taking 
my caller much more fully into our confidence than 
I had intended to do. What stopped me was the 
53 


THE GHOST GIRL 

idea that perhaps this was exactly what the Doctor 
had intended. 

“ I’m afraid I sha’n’t be much good as a substi- 
tute,” said 1. 

“ Why,” said the Doctor, “ it is possible that 
you’ll do better than the man himself. You don’t 
mind my asking a few questions? ” 

“ Not a bit,” said 1. “ I’ll answer anything I can. 

Sit down, won’t you.” 

He didn’t take the chair I indicated, but walked 
across the room and drew up another one. I took 
it that the maneuver was executed to give him a bet- 
ter chance to look around the studio — possibly to 
see whether the portrait of the girl in the satin gown 
was in sight anywhere. 

“ I am a substitute myself,” he said, when he was 
settled in the chair he had selected. “ Jeffrey 
painted a portrait for a — client, or patient, or rela- 
tive of mine, I don’t know just which to say since she 
comes under all three categories — Miss Meredith.” 

“ I didn’t know you were related to her,” I ob- 
served. 

He shot a quick look at me. “ I see you know 
about her already,” said he. “ All the better. I’m 
not a relative in any strict sense,” he went on. “ A 
sort of half nephew by marriage, perhaps. We’re 
all so mixed up that it is difficult to keep such 
matters straight. However, it’s a close enough 
family connection to justify me in going rather out- 
54 


THE JADE EARRING 

side of the strict duties of a medical practitioner.” 

“ Justify? ” I questioned. 

“ Why, in the main,” he said, “ I hold that a 
doctor should be a doctor to his patients and noth- 
ing else. The relation, if extended beyond that, is 
liable to abuse. But Miss Meredith’s case is pe- 
culiar. She is an old lady, frail, nervous — quite 
alone in the world, for all her family has been a 
numerous one. She’s entirely unable to meet the 
various business and social demands that are made 
on a person of her wealth and position. I am able 
to get on with her better than most people, and so it 
has happened that I have given up my practice and 
devoted myself exclusively to her affairs.” 

He said it all in a very straightforward fashion. 
His frankness seemed almost to admit the^existence 
of a mercenary motive in what he had done, for 
certainly he was speaking of her with no pretense of 
affection. But one was inclined to say: “After 
all, why not? ” The only thing that I didn’t like 
was his telling it to me. He made such a parade of 
candor that I distrusted him a little. 

He laughed. If I could have spoken my thoughts 
aloud, he couldn’t have read them more accurately 
than he did. 

“ You’re wondering why I should tell you all this,” 
he said. “ Well, it’s a necessary preliminary to some 
questions I’m going to ask. You know who it was 
that Mr. Jeffrey painted the portrait of? ” 

55 


THE GHOST GIRL 


“ Miss Meredith’s niece, I think he said.” 

He nodded. “ And did Mr. Jeffrey inform you 
also that he accepted Miss Meredith’s commission 
without seeing her — that he has, in fact, never seen 
her?” 

“ Yes,” said 1. “ He told me that too.” 

“ It must have struck him as a very curious ar- 
rangement,” the Doctor went on. Really it was 
by my advice that the thing was done that way. As 
I said. Miss Meredith is a very nervous woman and 
the death of her niece seems to have caused her a 
serious shock. They were in Paris together three 
years ago, when the girl died.” 

“ That would accentuate the shock of course,” said 
I, “ being alone with her in a foreign country. 
They were traveling about together, I suppose.” 

“ No, as a matter of fact,” said the Doctor, “ they 
were living in Paris. Miss Meredith prefers the 
continent to this country and Claire was, I believe, 
studying art.” 

I couldn’t help the catch in my breath that came 
just then. I was quick enough to choke the excla- 
mation of astonishment that was on my lips. I ex- 
perienced, for a moment, the same sensation that 
must have been Jeffrey’s constant companion during 
the past two months and I didn’t wonder at 
the look of panic that sometimes came into his eyes. 
The Doctor wasn’t looking at me, and I was 
glad of it. 


56 


THE JADE EARRING 

‘‘ That was three years ago, you say? ” I tried 
to make the question sound casual enough, but I 
don’t know how well I succeeded. 

He nodded. “ She died of small-pox during the 
epidemic of that year,” he said. “ Miss Meredith 
never got over the shock of it. The girl is very con- 
stantly in her thoughts and she wanted a portrait that 
should be a more living memorial than the one pho- 
tograph which she possessed. But you will under- 
stand, I think, that it was impossible, in her con- 
dition, to talk calmly about the girl to a stranger — 
to tell him in detail, facts about her appearance such 
as Mr. Jeffrey wanted. So I had to undertake to 
convey them to him at second-hand. It is really 
marvelous that, under such a handicap, he succeeded 
so well.” 

“ He told me that Miss Meredith had apparently 
found it satisfactory,” said I. 

The Doctor laughed. “ Satisfactory isn’t pre- 
cisely the word I should use,” said he. “ It doesn’t 
cover the ground at all. In fact, the portrait was so 
vivid and poignant a reminder of Claire herself, 
that the sight of it the day when she came here to 
the studio upset her dreadfully. She looked for- 
ward to getting final possession of it with a mixture 
of anxiety and dread. In fact, the memory of it has 
possessed her imagination ever since, in a way that I, 
as her physician, am forced to regret.” 

“ The portrait then,” said I, “ is more like the 
5 57 


THE GHOST GIRL 

original than the photograph from which it was 
painted? ” 

The Doctor nodded. “ Strikingly so,” said he. 

Again I had to draw in a long, slow breath to 
steady myself. But when I had done that, I man- 
aged to say indifferently enough, “ Oh, well, the 
ways of genius are past finding out. Mr. Jeffrey’s 
genius as a portrait painter seems to lie in getting be- 
neath the surfaces of things and presenting the liv- 
ing reality. If he can do that with a living face, 
which is often inexpressive enough, to the ordinary 
eye, of the character beneath it, it is not so wonder- 
ful that he should do it, to a less extent of course, 
with a momentary record of a face as it appears in a 
photograph. It’s a great test of his powers though, 
and a wonderful compliment to them.” 

The Doctor nodded thoughtfully, and there was 
a little silence before he spoke again. 

“ Mr. Jeffrey lived in Paris for some time, didn’t 
he?” 

“ Oh, years ago,” said I. “ Long before I knew 
him. Of course, like every painter, he goes back 
occasionally for visits.” 

“ I suppose he’s been back there within the last 
four or five years? ” 

“ Oh, yes,” said I. 

The Doctor let another moment go by in silence. 
“ I am going to be frank with you,” he said at last, 
“ and I hope you will be frank with me. I hope 


THE JADE EARRING 

what I have already told you of my relation with 
Miss Meredith is enough to clear me of the charge 
of idle curiosity. Miss Meredith is far from a well 
woman. She has had the idea, ever since she came 
here to look at Mr. Jeffrey’s portrait of her niece, 
that that portrait wasn’t painted exclusively from 
the photograph. Mr. Jeffrey must have seen and 
remembered the girl herself. And nothing would 
satisfy her short of my coming to ask Mr. Jeffrey if 
that had been the case.” 

“ I’m sure,” said I, “ that Jeffrey will be glad to 
go to see her and set her mind at rest in the matter.” 

With all the man’s easy frankness, his almost un- 
necessary frankness, I could not be rid of the feeling 
that there was something wary about him — watch- 
ful — alert. I had had that feeling through the 
whole of our interview. And with his reception of 
these last words of mine, it grew ten-fold stronger. 

“ That won’t be necessary,” said he. “ I’m afraid 
it wouldn’t be advisable. She receives no visitors at 
all. In her present condition she is not able to re- 
ceive them. But, if you know anything about it, one 
way or another, I wish you’d tell me. If you don’t, 
you can ask Jeffrey, when you see him, and drop me 
a line.” 

“ I could say this much,” said I, “ that I am quite 
sure if Jeffrey had been painting from the memory 
of any living face he had ever seen, he would have 
told me so. He hasn’t told me so, and therefore, I 
59 


THE GHOST GIRL 


conclude that Miss Meredith is mistaken. Surely 
the mistake is natural enough to one in her condi- 
tion.” 

“ Oh, yes, of course, of course,” he said. But 
there wasn’t much conviction in his voice. “ It 
strikes me as possible, though,” he went on, “ that 
he might have met her on one of his visits to Paris, 
while she was living there, or have seen her and been 
struck by her appearance without learning her name. 
I haven’t seen her since she was a little girl, but I am 
told she grew into a very beautiful woman. So that 
a memory of her might have been evoked by the 
photograph and could easily have had an effect on 
the portrait without his knowing it.” 

“ That’s ingenious at any rate,” said I, “ and al- 
most plausible. How long had Miss Claire Mere- 
dith been living in Paris when she died of small- 
pox?” 

“ Not quite two years,” said the Doctor. 

“ Then I’m afraid that disposes of the theory. 
Jeffrey was living with me in an apartment on Madi- 
son Square all that time, and I know he didn’t leave 
the country.” 

There was a little pause. 

“ He did go to Paris two years ago, didn’t he? ” 
The Doctor said it very indifferently, so that it 
hardly sounded like a question at all. But, all the 
same, he waited for an answer — waited. I’d almost 
have sworn, a little breathlessly. 

6o 


THE JADE EARRING 

“ Oh, yes,” said L “ My wife and I visited him 
there. But that, if my dates are right, was a year 
after the young lady died.” 

“ Oh, yes,” he said quickly. “ I wasn’t thinking 
of that.” 

But he had been thinking of just that, I felt 
sure. And unless my imagination was working over- 
time, he was paler than he had been when he came 
in. 

“ I’m afraid the unconscious memory theory won’t 
work,” said I. “That’s a pity, too; because I sup- 
pose it would have been a comfort to Miss Mere- 
dith.” 

He turned on his smile again, rose, buttoned his 
overcoat and shook hands with me. “ I’m just as 
much obliged to you, anyway. And we’ll fall back 
on your theory; that the ways of genius are past find- 
ing out. What if he did paint a portrait of a face 
he’d never seen and improve on the only record of it 
we’ve given him. After all, that’s no more myste- 
rious than writing Hamlet.” 

“ Do you suppose Shakespeare believed in 
ghosts?” I asked. 

He looked at me steadily for a moment, in 
thoughtful silence. “ Everybody believes in ghosts,” 
he said. “ Everybody! ” 

He stood near the door, his walking stick tucked 
under his arm while he drew on his gloves. But 
when he had finished and had laid his hand on the 

6i 


THE GHOST GIRL 


knob, he stopped short as if he had just remem- 
bered something. 

“ There’s something else Miss Meredith wanted 
me to ask about,” he said. “ I nearly forgot it.” 

“ Yes? ” said I inquiringly. 

“ I wonder if I mayn’t have a look at the por- 
trait? I can explain what I mean better that way.” 

“ I’m afraid not,” I told him. “ I don’t know 
where it is. Jeffrey said something about some 
trouble he had had with the frame. I don’t know 
whether the canvas is in the studio or not; but I 
don’t like to rummage.” 

“ Of course not,” he assented cordially. “ It’s 
a very trifling matter, really. The pose of the face 
shows one ear, and that is in deep shadow. But in 
the portrait, just below the ear, there is a streak of 
bluish green light. Miss Meredith couldn’t account 
for it and she has been wondering about it ever 
since. It looks as if it were meant for an earring — 
a jade earring, perhaps. But there was nothing 
like that in the photograph.” 

“ Of course,” said I, “ nobody could answer a ques- 
tion like that except Jeffrey himself. But I doubt if 
there’s any mystery about it. He probably put it 
there on the spur of the moment, because it helped 
his harmony or his composition, or some other of 
the tricks of his trade. But I’ll ask him, if you like. 
He has your address, of course. He can drop you a 
line when he comes in and tell you all about it.” 

62 


THE JADE EARRING 

The Doctor began unbuttoning his coat and fum- 
bling with his gloved hand in one of his inner pockets. 
“ I wish you would ask him.,” he said. “ But when 
it comes to letting me know, I wish you’d take charge 
of that yourself. I never knew a genius who was a 
reliable letter writer.” 

He had got out his pocket-book by now and was 
fishing for a card. Presently he got one and held it 
out to me. 

“ Is it too much to ask? ” he concluded. “ Just 
a line telling what Jeffrey says about his reason for 
putting that little green streak into that shadow on 
his canvas. There’s my address. If you undertake 
it for me, I shall be sure of hearing.” 

“ I’ll be very glad to,” said I. 

‘‘Good-by, then; and thank you.” The next 
moment he was gone. 

I stood in my tracks, staring thoughtfully at the 
door he had closed behind him. I hoped Jeffrey 
wouldn’t come in for a while. There was so much 
to think about and I wanted my thoughts in order 
before I tried to tell them to him. 

After a while, my eyes fell to the rug where Dr. 
Crow had stood while he was fishing for the card 
with his address upon it. They caught the shine of 
something, half buried in the deep nap of the rug. 
My hands were trembling when I stooped to pick it 
up. It was a long, pendant earring of polished 
jade ! 


63 


CHAPTER VI 


BELIEVING IN GHOSTS 

B ut even as I stood there, staring dully at the 
thing that lay in the palm of my hand and 
glowed dully back at me, with the impenetrable look 
of mystery jade always has, the door from the re- 
ception room opened from behind me. I put the 
hand with the earring Into my trousers pocket, 
turned and faced Jeffrey. 

“ Did you meet Crow? ’’ I asked. “ He’s just 
this minute gone.” 

He shook his head. “ I heard you talking in here 
as I came by the door, so I waited. He made you 
quite a visit. Had he anything to say? ” 

“ Oh, he wanted to see the portrait,” said I. 
“ He said Miss Meredith was waiting for It with a 
mixture of anxiety and dread.” 

“ She’ll probably have It In a few days,” said 
Jeffrey. “ Richards seems to have no doubt about 
recovering It. He thinks he knows where It Is.” 

“ Where does he think It Is? ” I asked. 

Jeffrey shook his head. “ He didn’t tell me. He 
asked me a few questions and jumped to a theory of 
his own. I couldn’t follow him. It’s the first time 
64 


BELIEVING IN GHOSTS 


anything like that ever happened to me. To be out- 
guessed by a policeman ! I’m losing my wits, I sup- 
pose. Of course I didn’t ask him.” 

He walked moodily across to his Morris chair 
and dropped into it with an air of utter lassitude and 
fatigue. 

I hated to begin asking him questions. Poor 
Jeffrey ! If the inextricable tangle of coincidences in 
which we were involved already, terrified and be- 
wildered him, what would his condition be when he 
heard the rest? When I told him the whole story 
of my conversation with Doctor Crow and when I 
showed him the thing I had just put in my pocket? 
The thing had to be done, however. 

“ Jeffrey,” said I, “ Miss Meredith and the Doc- 
tor were terribly puzzled by that portrait.” , 

“Puzzled?” 

I nodded. “ Jeffrey, it’s more like the original 
than the photograph was.” 

I expected his eyes to widen at that and his body 
to grow tense. Instead, he answered indifferently 
enough. 

“ What of it? It ought to be more like.” 

“ You mean, I suppose, that any really great art- 
ist sees beneath the surface of things — depicts an 
inner truth that. . . .” 

“Inner truth be Mowed!” interrupted Jeffrey. 
“ It’s surfaces I’m talking about. A photograph of 
anything but a flat object is never by any possibility 

65 


THE GHOST GIRL 


correct. You can photograph an etching, or the 
page out of a book, or a set of working drawings, 
with absolute accuracy, but never anything in the 
round. There is only one plane in a photograph 
that is in true focus. Everything that comes 
nearer than that plane is too big. Everything be- 
hind that plane is too small. Any competent 
draughtsman can correct a photograph and any com- 
petent portrait painter can paint from a photograph 
a portrait that is more like than the photograph it- 
self.” 

His manner nettled me a little; all the more be- 
cause it was so rare with him. Of course he had 
some excuse for being irritable to-day and I might 
have remembered that any sort of culturene talk 
about Art with a big A, always made him impatient. 
But he had made it easier than I had expected, to 
speak about the earring. 

“ All right,” said I. “ We’ll let the inner truth 
be blowed as far as you like and get down to facts. 
Did you do anything beside correcting the drawing 
in the photograph? ” 

“ Beside?” 

“ Did you paint anything in it that wasn’t there? 
Did you make up anything and slap it in, just to make 
the picture look better — or harmonize — or com- 
pose better — or, well for any other reason, Jeff- 
rey?” 

He was looking at me keenly enough now. 

66 


BELIEVING IN GHOSTS 


“What do you mean?” he asked. “What are 
you talking about? ” 

“ Dr. Crow,” said I, “ expressed some curiosity 
about a light bluish green streak in the shadow under 
the ear. He wondered if it had been meant to 
represent an earring — say a jade earring.” 

Jeffrey was on his feet now and his eyes were blaz- 
ing. “ Did he ask that question himself? Just that 
way? ” he demanded. 

“ Just that way, Jeffrey.” His excitement had in- 
fected me now, and my question asked itself jerkily. 
“ Jeffrey, was there a jade earring in the other por- 
trait — the one you found in your studio when you 
came back from Etaples? ” 

He didn’t answer for a full minute. And all the 
while his unseeing eyes never left my face. All the 
power of his mind was concentrated in the struggle 
to reproduce and perfect a memory. 

“ No,” he said at last. “ It wasn’t in the por- 
trait. But I can tell you where it was. Drew. It 
was in the ear of the girl who stood beside me on the 
bridge that night at Paris.” 

“ What did it look like? ” I asked breathlessly. 

Once more he took his time about answering. 
His eyelids narrowed to slits and the contracted 
pupils were no bigger than pin-points. 

“ There was a tiny ring which pierced the lobe of 
the ear,” he said, “ and below that, a small perfect 
sphere of jade; below that was a long, rounded, 
67 


THE GHOST GIRL 

tapering pendant. It’s as clear to me as if I had it 
in my hand.” 

“ Like this? ” I asked and I took my hand out of 
my pocket. There in my palm lay the thing he had 
described. 

The moment I uncovered it, I regretted having 
sprung this last mine in so theatrical a fashion. Had 
I not been as excited as he, I shouldn’t have done 
it. Because I really feared that the shock of this 
last — could I call it a coincidence ? — might do him 
a serious injury. My own brain was reeling with 
the weird, incredible extravagance of it and to me 
the whole thing came at second hand. What would 
it be to him who had felt the unknown, undiscover- 
able presence in his Paris studio ; who had found the 
portrait painted there, who had seen the photograph 
of the same face and had learned that it was the face 
of a girl who was dead a whole year before that 
ghostly portrait had been painted? 

I stood there for a minute, not daring to look at 
him, fearing that there might break any moment on 
my ears, a burst of maniacal laughter. But, utterly 
to my astonishment, what I did hear was a long, 
deep breath of the most intense relief. 

“Thank the Lord! ” said Jeffrey. 

He took the earring from my hand, carried it 
over to the light and subjected it to a minute, care- 
ful scrutiny. I noticed that he was rubbing a finger 
over its smooth, cool surface as if the actual, ma- 
68 


BELIEVING IN GHOSTS 

terial feeling of it were an intense satisfaction to 
him. Then he tucked it into his pocket, pulled him- 
self up on a high painting stool and hooked his heels 
into the rungs. He was a new man again. Rather, 
he was the old man — the man he had been before 
he went to Paris and had never been since. 

He gave his head a rueful shake. “ I’ve had a 
scare. Drew. The worst I ever had in my life. I 
didn’t even dare tell you how bad it was. That will 
have to be my apology for the way I treated you this 
morning. Now that it’s over I’ll try to make 
amends. Let’s go to lunch. Richards won’t be 
here for an hour or two.” 

Then, for the first time, he seemed to notice the 
astonishment that had held me speechless — but 
that I am sure must have shown In my face. 

“What’s the matter with you?” he asked. 
“ Don’t you understand? ” 

“ I can understand the scare all right,” said I. 
“ But why you should say It Is over now. Is beyond 
me. I was almost afraid to show you that earring. 
I was afraid it might — finish you. It pretty near 
finished me.” 

He smiled at me — his old, amused. Irrepressible 
smile. 

“ Man,” said I, “ the girl was dead, and you saw. 
her. One might have explained the portrait, but it 
wasn’t in the portrait that you saw the earring. It 
was In the ear of the girl herself. And she was 
69 


THE GHOST GIRL 


dead. . . . And yet, you described the earring 

in the most minute detail.” 

“ Oh, come along to lunch,” said Jeffrey. “ I’m 
hungry as a hod-carrier when they blow the whistle. 
I’ll tell you all about it across the corner of a square 
meal.” 

And no persuasion of mine could get another word 
out of him until we were fairly seated in a near by 
restaurant and had sent away the waiter with an 
order that did ample justice to Jeffrey’s boast about 
his appetite. 

“ By the way,” said Jeffrey, “ you haven’t told me 
where you got that earring.” 

“ No,” said I, rather sulkily. “ As long as you 
have solved the mystery so easily without that in- 
formation, I don’t see why you should want it.” 

Jeffrey smiled again and reached over and patted 
me on the arm. 

There is some sort of magic in Jeffrey’s touch. 
In this case it wiped away my resentment as a sponge 
wipes the writing off a slate. 

“ Crow left it,” said I. 

“Left it! Crow?” 

“ Oh, quite involuntarily. He had his gloves on 
and he was fishing in his card-case for a card with 
his address on it.” 

“ I had his address,” said Jeffrey. 

“ His confidence in you as a letter-writer is very 
limited,” said I, “ and he said he really wanted an 
70 


BELIEVING IN GHOSTS 

explanation of that green streak in the shadow under 
the ear. He relied on me to get it for him. The 
earring must have been in his card-case and when 
he fished out his card, he dropped it. That’s a very 
soft, thick rug and it didn’t make any noise.” 

‘‘ Crow,” said Jeffrey, thoughtfully^ “ Crow. I 
wonder if he will turn out to be the beginning. I 
wonder if the first step in our mystery lies his way.” 

“ The first step ! ” I cried. “ Then you haven’t 
solved it? ” 

Solved it,” cried Jeffrey, “ I haven’t tried to 
solve it. Haven’t begun to solve it.” 

“ But,” I protested, “ up there in the studio, you 
said you had had a bad scare, but it was over.” 

“ Yes,” said Jeffrey. “ The scare was over and 
the mystery begun. Can’t you see what a relief it 
is to know that it is a mystery? What do you sup- 
pose it was that I was afraid of? That I had seen 
a ghost? ” 

‘‘ Why, something like that,” said I. 

“ I am perfectly willing to see a ghost,” said 
Jeffrey, ‘‘ if I can be convinced that it is a ghost — 
an outside ghost — somebody else’s ghost as well as 
mine. The thing that terrified me was that I 
couldn’t prove, even to myself, that it was anything 
more than a kink in my own mind — a bunch of 
hallucinations and obsessions of my own produc- 
ing — the sort of things that make the alienists 
rich. 


71 


THE GHOST GIRL 


“ But now I know that what I saw on the bridge 
that night in Paris, was either a live woman, or an 
honest ghost. I’m going to find out which it was. 
Whichever it was, that earring Crow was so curious 
about, lets me out. No two people ever have ex- 
actly the same mania, and he is evidently as curious 
about the thing that wore the earring as I am.” 

“ He or Miss Meredith,” said I. 

“ Yes, he or the mysterious Miss Meredith,” Jeff- 
rey assented. “ For the present, we’ll consider them 
one person, and that one person Doctor Crow. Now 
let us try to figure out Crow’s position. This is 
going to be logic, which is your department, so you 
will have to correct me, if I go wrong. 

“Crow gets me to paint a. portrait. We don’t 
know why he came to me. I didn’t want to paint it 
and he insisted. The question is, had he any reason 
for insisting, beyond the fact that his client was rich 
and that I was fashionable? We have no means of 
answering that question yet. I didn’t tell him where 
my studio was the last time I spent a winter in Paris, 
but he might have found it out from someone 
else.” 

“ And if he knew,” I cried, “ he might have 
thought that in that particular place you might see 
something. He might have wanted to try his ex- 
periment.” 

“ Exactly,” said Jeffrey. “ But we can’t build 
upon that yet. That’s got to stay in the question 
72 


BELIEVING IN GHOSTS 


column. Anyhow, I paint the portrait, and the por- 
trait shows some data which were not contained in 
the photograph he gave me.’^ 

He looked up at me thoughtfully. “ What did 
he begin on? ” he asked. “ Did he begin with the 
earring? ” 

“ No,” said I. “ He began by trying to find out 
if you couldn’t have met the girl — if you hadn’t 
been in Paris during the time she was there.” 

“ During the time she lived there,” Jeffrey cor- 
rected. 

I nodded. 

“ You satisfied him that that was impossible? ” he 
asked. 

“ Completely,” said I. “ It was as perfect an 
alibi as you ever saw.” 

“ And then? ” Jeffrey went on. 

“ He asked,” said I, “ if you hadn’t been to Paris 
two years ago? ” 

“ After the girl had died,” he commented. 

“ I pointed that out to him,” said I. “ But still, 
I thought he held his breath while he waited for my 
answer.” 

“ So that he evidently thought it possible,” said 
(Jeffrey, “ that I might have seen her after she was 
— dead. I wonder if Doctor Crow believes in 
ghosts.” 

“ He said he did,” said I. 

“ What?” 


6 


73 


THE GHOST GIRL 


“ He said that everybody did. That would in- 
clude him, I suppose.’’ 

“ Your logic is flawless,” said Jeffrey. “ But 
how did he come to make that observation? ” 

“ It was quite casual,” said I. “ I happened 
to say that I wondered if Shakespeare believed in 
them.” 

“ Casually? ” 

“ Oh, yes. He said something about Hamlet that 
put it in my head. I suppose the subject never was 
very far out.” 

“ I wish I had seen him,” said Jeffrey. 

Why do you make so important a matter of 
it?” I asked. 

Jeffrey looked at me with a rueful little frown 
that had half a smile in it. 

“ Because, my dear Drew,” said he, “ if Doctor 
Crow doesn’t believe in ghosts, then he has got some 
reason for doubting that Claire Meredith is really 
dead. He suspects I saw something. If he is per- 
fectly sure it couldn’t have been a ghost I saw, then 
he must know that it is possible that what I saw 
was the living woman.” 

There was a moment’s silence. Then Jeffrey 
brought his hand down suddenly, but softly, on the 
table. 

“ And then the earrings,” he whispered. “ Crow 
has the earrings — or he had till he dropped one of 
them this morning. If it isn’t a ghost I saw on the 
74 


BELIEVING IN GHOSTS 


bridge, she had the earrings then. If Crow doesn’t 
believe in ghosts, then he has seen the living woman 
since I did.” 

“How do you make that out?” I asked. 

“ Why, you idiot,” he cried, “ how else did he 
get them from her? He has them now; she had 
them then, unless she was dead then and buried and 
a ghost that I saw. We’d have taken a long step in 
our mystery, if we could be sure whether Doctor 
Crow believed in ghosts or not.” 


CHAPTER VII 


THE FACE UNDER THE PAINT 

1 WENT back with Jeffrey to the studio after 
lunch, although I was uneasily conscious that 
my office chair was yawning for me. Jeffrey’s af- 
fairs are always so much more interesting than my 
own that there isn’t as much generosity and self- 
sacrifice as he credits me with in my ready devotion 
to his. 

We found Richards, the police lieutenant, wait- 
ing for us. 

“ I’m sorry to have kept you,” said Jeffrey, “ but 
I found I needed a square meal.” 

“ Oh, I didn’t mind waiting,” Richards assured 
him. “ But you missed a caller.” 

“ A caller? ” said Jeffrey. 

He and I exchanged a glance. “Crow?” I 
whispered under my breath. 

“ He didn’t leave his name,” said Richards. 
“ He’s the rug man.” 

“ Oh,” said Jeffrey, indifferently. “ Did he 
wait long? ” 

“ No,” said the Lieutenant. “ He examined the 
rug rather carefully and said he’d let you know 
about it in the morning.” 

76 


THE FACE UNDER THE PAINT 

“ Which rug was it? ” I asked. 

“ The one over there by the door. That was 
the right one, wasn’t it?” 

The Lieutenant asked the last question of Jeffrey. 

“ Oh, yes,” said Jeffrey. “ He knew which one it 
was right enough. Do you remember what he 
looked like ? ” 

“ Why,” said the Lieutenant, “ he was a pretty 
tall, good looking, dark . . .” 

“ Oh, you needn’t describe him,” Jeffrey inter- 
rupted. “Just remember him. You may meet 
him again sometime.” 

The Lieutenant laughed. “ What? Is he one 
of your — what do you call them — latent crim- 
inals ? ” 

“ I don’t know,” said Jeffrey. “ But it will do 
you no harm to remember what he looked like.” 

We ensconced Richards in the big chair and 
provided him with a big cigar. 

Jeffrey went over to his paint table and began an 
elaborate pretense of setting it to rights. 

“Well?” he asked. “Any luck with my little 
affair? Are you going to be able to get that por- 
trait back for me? ” 

The Lieutenant unctuously licked the wrapper of 
his cigar and favored it with the caressing gaze of 
a connoisseur, before he answered. He was in 
very good humor with himself. 

“ I have got it,” he said. 

77 


THE GHOST GIRL 


“Already?” I cried. 

“ The Lieutenant had the right guess this morn- 
ing,” said Jeffrey. “ I suspected as much.” 

“ But you couldn’t figure out what the guess was,” 
said Richards. 

Then he turned to me. “ I don’t mind admit- 
ting, Mr. Drew, that this young fellow has pulled 
some long shots in the crime detecting business that 
the front office has never been able to understand. 
lYou saw one of them yourself, and they tell me you 
wrote a book about it. But when it comes right 
down to cases, an old professional thief catcher like 
me has got a few tricks of his own. Mr. Jeff- 
rey here might have worked his game, whatever 
it is — I don’t pretend to understand it — for 
five years and he wouldn’t have found it. But 
he came to me and I put my hand on it in fifteen 
minutes.” 

“ Oh, you will see for yourself,” he went on, for 
both of us showed the surprise we felt at his an- 
nouncement. “ They’ll bring it up in the wagon. 
It’ll be here any time now. But the next time, Mr. 
Drew, that you write a detective story, you might 
give the police a little credit. 

“ It was near eleven o’clock when Mr. Jeffrey 
made his complaint.” He pulled out a big gold 
watch in a hunting case and looked at it impress- 
ively. “ His picture’ll be back here before two. 
That’s three hours. Mr. Jeffrey never worked any 
78 


THE FACE UNDER THE PAINT 


quicker than that himself. And, as I told you, he 
wouldn’t have got it back himself in five years.” 

‘‘ Oh, come,” said Jeffrey. “ There aren’t as 
many fences as that in town. I shouldn’t have 
known the right one to go to first, but I know some- 
thing about them. Besides, I could probably have 
advertised a reward and got it eventually.” 

“ You could have advertised,” said the Lieuten- 
ant, “ until you were black in the face, and you could 
have gone to every fence in New York City, if you 
knew where they were, which you don’t, and at 
that you would never have found it.” 

“ All right,” said Jeffrey. “ You’ve got me. 
I’d like to know how you did it.” 

“ Well,” said Richards, “ you’ve made me ask 
that question a good many times, and turn about is 
fair play. This is the way I figured it out: To 
begin with, pictures don’t get stolen. Frames do, 
sometimes, and if there’s a picture in the frame, it 
may go along too. But this picture wasn’t in a 
frame.” 

“ It seems to me,” said Jeffrey, “ I remember 
hearing about a picture called The Mona Lisa, in 
Paris, that was stolen. And then there was that 
Gainsborough that Pinkerton got back.” 

“ Oh, sure, that kind of pictures,” said the 
Lieutenant impatiently. “ Pictures out of gal- 
leries. What I mean, is the kind of pictures you 
paint.” 


79 


THE GHOST GIRL 


Jeffrey laughed. “ I appreciate the distinction,” 
he- said. “ Go ahead.” 

“ There’d be no use taking such a thing,” the 
Lieutenant went on, “ because it wouldn’t be pos- 
sible to dispose of it. No regular fence would 
know what to do with it. If a man had stolen it, 
the only thing for him to do would be to get into 
communication with you and try to make you ran- 
som it. And what should you pay money to ran- 
som it for, when you can paint another?” 

Jeffrey concealed his grin this time, and he asked 
demurely enough: 

“ Then the next step in your reasoning would be, 
I should think, that since pictures of this sort are 
never stolen, it follows that mine wasn’t.” 

“ Exactly,” said the Lieutenant. “ That’s the 
way I figured it out. It wasn’t stolen at all. It 
was borrowed.” 

We both exclaimed at that. 

“ Borrowed,” repeated the Lieutenant, impres- 
sively. 

“ The borrower hasn’t been in any hurry to return 
it,” said Jeffrey with a laugh. 

“ He meant to return it,” said the Lieutenant, 
“ but he couldn’t return it.” 

Jeffrey looked around with a quick frown of in- 
terest. 

“ I’ve been expecting to catch up with you every 
minute,” he said, “ but I’m as far behind you as 
8o 


THE FACE UNDER THE PAINT 

ever. How did you settle in your mind who this 
borrower had been? ” 

“ You gave me the clew to that,” said Richards. 
“ You told me you had painted the portrait from a 
photograph of a lady who is dead. Do you re- 
member that I asked you how much they.* were 
going to pay you for it? You thought the question 
was none of my business and you only gave me a 
general idea of the amount, but it was enough to 
go on. And then you said that as soon as you fin- 
ished it, you went away on a three months’ vacation.” 

“ Do you mean to say,” asked Jeffrey, ‘‘ that the 
amount I had been paid for painting the picture, 
helped to guide you to the discovery of the borrower 
of it?” 

“ It’s like this,” said Richards. “ Anybody who 
would pay as many thousands as that for a portrait 
of a person who is dead, must have a good deal of 
interest in that person and must have a lot of money 
left for other purposes. 

“ Now, anybody with lots of money and with ex- 
ceptional interest in a person recently dead, is par- 
ticularly good game for one sort of crook. That 
crook is the spiritualist. You haven’t been in the 
city the last few months. If you had, and had kept 
up your interest in the doings of the police, you 
would have known there was a crusade on against 
the spiritualists. There are a number of very 
clever ones in the city and they have pulled off some 

8i 


THE GHOST GIRL 


pretty big hauls. When they picked old man Mar- 
tin clean and left his heirs holding the bag, they 
went a little too far and we got after them. It’s 
wonderful how much they know; how carefully they 
watch people. That’s the whole thing in their 
gam^e, of course. They’re prepared to take ad- 
vantage of any opportunity that comes along.” 

The Lieutenant got up, walked across the studio 
and threw open the door into the reception room. 

“ I thought I’d see if your Jap boy had come 
back,” he said. 

“Come back?” said Jeffrey. “He shouldn’t 
have gone out. He ought to be here now.” 

“ He slipped away just after he let me in,” said 
Richards, “ and I’ve an idea you won’t see him 
again, unless you want him for something. And 
in that case, you’ll have to come to us to find him 
for you. He’s just the sort those people try to get 
hold of. They can pick up lots of interesting things. 
Japs always love to be spies and they have excep- 
tional facilities for it, because people talk before 
them as they wouldn’t before anyone of their own 
sort.” 

“ Well,” said Jeffrey, “ that’s one on me. I’ve 
talked before him myself, as if he’d been a plaster 
image. Goodness knows what he may not have 
found out about me. But I’m beginning to get the 
idea, I think. My Jap tips it off to some spiritualist 
that I am painting the portrait of a young lady who 
82 


THE FACE UNDER THE PAINT 

died a short time ago; that the person who com- 
missioned me to paint it is wealthy, and then, by a 
lucky coincidence, that I was closing my studio and 
going off for a vacation. The spiritualist pays for 
the tip, comes up and borrows the portrait, with the 
idea of getting it safely back in place before my re- 
turn. But before he gets through with it, his place 
is raided and the portrait seized. That’s the chain 
of reasoning, isn’t it?” 

The Lieutenant nodded. 

“ And when you’d thought it out as far as that,” 
Jeffrey went on, “ you went up into some sort of 
lumber room up there at police headquarters and 
hauled it out from a heap of other junk you’d con- 
fiscated when you raided their place.” 

“ Right you are,” said the Lieutenant. 

“ It’s even possible,” Jeffrey went on, “ that you 
remembered that that very picture had been brought 
in?” 

“What if I did?” said Richards. “I had to 
figure it out that that picture might be yours, didn’t 
I? ” 

“ Yes,” said Jeffrey. “ And it’s a good job.” 

“ I still don’t see,” said I, “ what the spiritualist 
wanted to borrow the portrait for.” 

“ Why to make up a ringer from, of course,” 
said the Lieutenant. 

“ Don’t you see,” said Jeffrey, “ with that picture 
to work from, they’d be able to produce a materiali- 

83 


THE GHOST GIRL 


zation that would be mighty effective, They get 
pretty good ones just from hearsay reports of what 
people looked like. But, with a portrait that 
showed the color of the hair and eyes and the t5^e 
of complexion; that even reproduced, in some detail, 
a dress that had belonged to her . . 

He broke off short and stood staring at us for a 
minute. Then, without another word, he rushed 
over to a big wardrobe and began pulling out its 
contents. They were very miscellaneous. All 
sorts of costumes, dresses, bits of drapery, old 
shawls. One at a time he flung them out into a 
heap on the floor. It was a simple, but efficacious 
way of looking for something and, to as unmethod- 
ical a man as Jeffrey, the only one. 

“ Well,” he said at last, turning to face us when 
the wardrobe stood empty. “ They must have got 
that, too. They gave me the girl’s own dress to 
paint the portrait from,” he went on. “ I posed a 
model in it for the figure. They evidently took 
that, too. By Jove ! That’s almost as awkward as 
the loss of the picture.” 

Oh, well,” said Richards, “ I can probably get 
it back for you. You will have to come down to 
headquarters and identify it. But it’s undoubtedly 
there with the rest of the junk. But you can see 
how slick the game is,” he went on. “ With the 
gown itself, and the portrait to make up from, they 
could have made the old lady think she was seeing 

84 


THE FACE UNDER THE PAINT 

ghosts all right, once they got their hooks into her.** 

Jeffrey paled a little and spoke to me with an 
uncertain little laugh. 

“ More ghosts ! ” he said. “ It’s queer the way 
it all fits in, isn’t it. Drew?” 

I nodded. For my own sake, as well as Jeff- 
rey’s, I was glad we had that earring — the one 
solitary material assurance we possessed that we 
weren’t dreaming or worse. For no mind, not even 
a solid, prosaic mind like my own, can resist a series 
of coincidences for very long. The notion that 
this portrait of the ghost girl that had so mysteri- 
ously disappeared, had been found again in the par- 
lors of a spiritualist, gave me a queer sense of dis- 
comfort. 

The Lieutenant was looking from Jeffrey’s face 
to mine in a puzzled, interested sort of way. 

^ “More ghosts?” he questioned. “What do 
you mean by that? Have you been seeing them, 
you two? ” 

Neither of us had an answer ready for him, and 
befo‘*e we could think of one, there came a ring at 
the bell. 

“ That’s probably the portrait now,” said Jeffrey. 

He had guessed right. For there in the door- 
way stood a big policeman carrying in his arms 
what wa;s evidently a big canvas, wrapped in brown 
wrapping paper. 

“I told them to do it up carefully,” said the 
85 


THE GHOST GIRL 


Lieutenant. “ After I heard the price they were 
going to pay for it, I began to see things different. 
I didn’t think it was anything so very much when 
they brought it in.” 

Jeffrey laughed. “ You’re very much like every- 
body else, when it comes to art criticism. They 
all want to see the price on the back, before they 
know whether to get enthusiastic or not.” 

“ Well,” said the Lieutenant, “ when I went back 
this morning and took another good look at it, I 
could see that it might be something pretty good.” 

Under his directions the policeman brought the 
canvas in and leaned it against the wall. “ That’s 
all,” he said. 

The policeman saluted and turned to go. I 
heard the clink of a coin as Jeffrey slipped his hand 
into his pocket and followed him out of the door. 

“ Now,” he said, as he returned a moment latei/. 
“ Now for a look! ” 

He carried the canvas, still in its wrappings of 
paper, over to his big studio easel and set it up. 
Then carefully and eagerly, he began cutting the 
strings that held the paper in place. Then, a 
single motion, he stripped the paper away and 
stepped back to get the full effect. 

He looked at the thing, at first with a stare of 
simple incomprehension; then his face turned red 
and, with a snort of anger, he wheeled round on 
the Lieutenant. 


86 


THE FACE UNDER THE PAINT 


“ What sort of a fool joke is this? ” he demanded. 

For my own part, astonishment held me for a 
moment, just as it had held Jeffrey, and then I burst 
into a shout of uncontrollable laughter. For, of 
all the ridiculous daubs that ever disgraced a can- 
vas, this particular atrocity was certainly the worst. 
You have probably seen in the show window of a 
department store, a painter turning out “ genuine 
oil paintings ” at the rate of four or five an hour, 
to be given away to the store’s patrons with every 
five dollars’ worth of purchases. Well, this oil 
painting looked a good deal like that, only it was 
much bigger and very much worse. 

“Isn’t it yours?” asked Richards. 

“Mine?” shouted Jeffrey. “No, I should say 
it was not mine.” 

“ All right,” said the Lieutenant. “ All right. 
I don’t see anything to get sore about. It was 
there and it corresponded to the description.” 

“ Corresponded . . Jeffrey looked at 

him ^blankly for a second then looked back at the 
canvas. And then he, too, began to laugh. 
“ You’re quite right, Richards,” he said when he 
got his breath. “ You’re quite right. It does cor- 
respond to the description. It’s a blonde girl — 
at least she’s meant for a girl — and that yellow 
swab stands for blonde hair. And that ghastly 
mess of white paint may have been meant for a 
white satin gown.” 


87 


THE GHOST GIRL 


Jeffrey got his breath with difficulty. “ It’s all 
right,” he assured the Lieutenant. “ You did your 
best and it was very clever of you really.” 

“ Oh, laugh, laugh,” said the Lieutenant. “ Go 
on, don’t mind me.” 

For Jeffrey was overcome at this point by a fresh 
paroxysm. 

“ You didn’t think much of it when you first saw 
it,” he gasped. “ But when you had another good 
look, you saw that it might be pretty good.” 

“ They all look alike to me,” said Richards, “ and 
I thought if some nut would pay six thousand dol- 
lars for it, there must be something there.” 

“ Drew,” said Jeffrey, “ hand the Lieutenant a 
fresh cigar and get him a drink. We’ll all have a 
drink,” he said, “ to the brilliant future of the 
painter and to the long life of his subject.” 

The Lieutenant began to get his good humor 
back again. He smiled rather ruefully. 

“ Well, my boy,” he said, “ I’m glad you didn’t 
paint it, that’s the truth. Because I was thinking 
that if you got six thousand dollars for a thing like 
that, you painters must be almost as ripe for a raid 
as the spiritualists.” 

He settled back comfortably with his fresh cigar 
and began rolling the joke around in his capacious 
head. He was enjoying it more and more every 
minute. 

Jeffrey, on the contrary, seemed suddenly sober. 

88 


THE FACE UNDER THE PAINT 

He paid no attention whatever to the Lieutenant’s 
jokes, but sti^od in front of that atrocious canvas, 
his hands deep in his trousers’ pockets, his head sunk 
forward on his shoulders, staring at it in a thought- 
ful abstraction. 

“ Coming to see something in it at last yourself, 
are you?” said the Lieutenant. 

“ Yes,” said Jeffrey seriously, “ I am.” 

He lifted the stretcher from the easel, turned it 
around and looked at the back of it; rubbed his 
fingers over the canvas, then replaced it on the easel 
and stared at it a little longer. Then, with a sud- 
den air of decision, he went over to his paint table 
and came back with a big tin pot of unpleasant 
looking, blackish green salve. In another minute, 
with the aid of a palette knife, he was rapidly 
smearing this stuff all over the surface of the 
canvas. 

Hold on ! ” said Richards. “ That thing may 
not be much good, but it’s somebody’s darlin’. I 
can’t let you spoil it.” 

The hand that held the palette knife went on all 
the faster. 

“ Don’t you worry,” said Jeffrey. “ I’m not 
spoiling it. I’m increasing its value about twenty 
thousand per cent.” 

There was a ring of excitement in his voice that 
I couldn’t account for. But, whenever Jeffrey 
spoke in' that particular tone, I stopped trying to in- 
7 89 


THE GHOST GIRL 

terfere with him. He knew what he was about 
when he talked like that. 

Richards still looked uneasy. 

“ Don’t you worry,” said I. “ I don’t know 
what he’s doing, but he does.” 

In another minute the canvas was completely 
covered with a thick greasy, blackish green smear. 
Jeffrey dropped the pot on the floor in his eagerness 
and fairly ran out of the studio into a little bathing 
and dressing-room that was partitioned off in the 
corner. 

“ He may have improved it,” said Richards dubi- 
ously, “ but I doubt if the man who painted it would 
think so.” 

The next minute Jeffrey came back with a bucket 
of water and a big bath sponge. 

“ Now you’ll see,” he said. 

He dipped the sponge in the water and began 
washing off the stuff he had just put on. It seemed 
to be taking the paint with it. And then I got a 
clew. As his sponge swept over the horrible pink 
daub that had been a hand, another hand appeared 
under it — an exquisite, slender hand, painted as 
only Jeffrey himself can paint them. The next 
stroke carred away a whole section of white paint 
and underneath it showed the shimmer of satin in 
long broken folds. 

‘‘Well, I’m damned!” said Richards. “The 
real picture’s underneath.” 

90 


THE FACE UNDER THE PAINT 

“ You’ve solved the mystery,” said Jeffrey ex- 
citedly. “ It is.” 

He hadn’t got to the face yet. He seemed to be 
leaving that to the last. But already we could see 
in the simple grace of the folds, the beautiful paint- 
ing of the figure, the exquisite tones of the back- 
ground, that the picture was one of extraordinary 
beauty. 

“ Let’s see the face, man,” said Richards. 
“ Let’s see the face.” 

“ In a minute,” said Jeffrey. 

Faster and faster flew the big sponge and more 
and more of the disfiguring paint that disguised it 
came away, leaving the original picture under its 
protecting coat of heavy varnish, intact. 

‘‘Now!” said Jeffrey. And with a last stroke 
of his great sponge he wiped the pink and yellow 
daubs away from the face and hands. 

“ There she is,” he said at last. “ What do you 
think of her?” 

He wrung out his sponge, tossed it away and 
began wiping his hands on a bath-towel, before he 
became aware of the tense silence; of the sudden 
mystery that was holding Richards and me spell- 
bound. 

We stared at that face and from it back into each 
other’s and then at the face again. 

“Well?” said Jeffrey. “What’s the matter 
with you fellows? Speak up. Was the person 

91 


THE GHOST GIRL 

who paid six thousand dollars for it such a nut after 
all, Richards?’’ 

But the question passed unheeded. The Lieuten- 
ant’s face was gray, but his eyes were shining with 
excitement. For myself, I was trembling all over 
and I found it hard to speak steadily. 

“ You recognize it, don’t you? ” I asked in a low 
voice. “ It’s the face . . 

“ Not a doubt about it in the world,” he said. 
“ It’s the face. I couldn’t forget it in a thousand 
years. I saw it, you know. Just after they found 
it.” 

“What do you mean?” said Jeffrey. “What 
are you talking about? ” 

“That,” said Richards, — “that’s the girl they 
found frozen in the ice. The girl nobody’s been 
able to identify.” 


CHAPTER VIII 

AN EVEN BREAK 

D O you mean,” asked Jeffrey, “ the girl Gwen- 
dolen was telling me about last night — the 
girl who had been murdered and thrown into the 
river? ” 

“ That’s who he means,” said Richards. “ This 
is the first clew we have found as to who she might 
be. What do you know about her?” 

Jeffrey didn’t answer. He was looking at the 
face on the canvas as studiously and intently as if 
he were seeing it for the first time. 

Richards repeated his question. “ What do you 
know about her? ” 

Nothing,” said Jeffrey. 

There was another silence. 

“ Come along, then ! ” said Richards impatiently. 
“ I want to find out all you know about her.” 

“ I know nothing about her, I tell you,” said 
Jeffrey. “ I never even heard of her till last night.” 
“ You painted her portrait,” said the Lieutenant. 
“ Oh, if that’s what you want,” said Jeffrey,* “ I 
can tell you a little, but not very much. This is 
the portrait of Miss Claire Meredith. She was, I 
understand, a very charming young lady with con- 
93 


THE GHOST GIRL 


siderable artistic talent and the expectation of a 
very large fortune which she would have inherited 
from a wealthy maiden aunt, had she survived her. 
As it is, this young lady died three years ago in 
Paris of small-pox. Her aunt, who is as rich as 
she is eccentric, and as eccentric as she is rich, has 
ever since been inconsolable over her loss, and last 
November commissioned me to paint this portrait. 
If you want to find out more about the young lady, 
you will have to go to the old one.” 

“ You never saw the girl yourself? You said 
she lived in Paris, didn’t you?” 

“ She died the year before I made my last visit 
to Paris,” said Jeffrey. “ I painted this from a 
photograph.” 

The Lieutenant was looking thoughtfully at the 
canvas now himself. 

Jeffrey laughed. “ No spirit painting about this, 
Lieutenant. The spirit portrait was the one I 
washed off just now.” 

“Well, it’s a good picture of her, all right — of 
the girl they found in the ice, I mean. It’s almost 
as good as a photograph of her. You can see who 
it’s meant for right off.” 

“ Did you happen to notice,” asked Jeffrey sud- 
denly, “whether the paint was wet — I mean the 
outer coat that had been put on over this — when 
it was brought into the station? ” 

“ I couldn’t say,” Richards answered. “ I 
94 


AN EVEN BREAK 


don’t believe so, though. Because it would have 
messed up everything if it had been. There wasn’t 
any cover over it. Why? ” 

“ I was wondering,” said Jeffrey, “ why they 
painted over it. Of course the obvious explanation 
would be that the raid had been tipped off, just as 
police raids usually are.” 

“ Like hell, they are,” said Richards. “ If ever 
anyone was caught with the goods, that bunch was. 
Tipped off ! Who do you think you’re talking 
to?” 

Jeffrey laughed. “ To an ornament to the 
Force,” he said. “ But you needn’t look so fierce 
about it. I’m not a reformer. And anyway, in 
this case, if the raid had been tipped off, the paint 
would have been wet on the canvas. Unless, of 
course, they got hold of the schedule of raids sev- 
eral days in advance.” 

The Lieutenant snorted. He was too indignant 
for articulate remonstrance. 

‘‘ But I can’t think of any other reason,” Jeffrey 
went on, “ why they should take the trouble to dis- 
guise the picture.” 

“ You can’t, can’t you,” said Richards. 

“ No,” said Jeffrey, and I don’t believe you 
can. 

“ Well, then, Mr. Sherlocko, you’d better stick 
to painting portraits and leave crime to the police. 
I’m just a plain blue-coat, but I can see a reason.” 

95 


THE GHOST GIRL 


He gave his attention to the portrait again; held 
up his hands so that they framed off the shining 
mass of hair and scrutinized the mask itself. 

It’s like her,” he said, “ but only in a general 
sort of way.” 

“What is the reason then? ” said Jeffrey, appar- 
ently paying no attention to this last remark. 

“ It’s so simple,” said the Lieutenant, “ I’m 
ashamed to tell you.” 

“Out with it!” said Jeffrey. “I play fair. I 
acknowledge when I’m wrong. You certainly did a 
good job in getting this portrait back. That was a 
fine clean piece of reasoning.” 

“ Well,” demanded Richards, “ doesn’t that 
reasoning help you to find a reason why they should 
disguise the portrait? Why did they take it in the 
first place? Because they wanted a ringer for this 
dead girl so that the old dame who ordered the 
portrait . . .” 

He didn’t bother to complete the sentence, but 
went on thoughtfully after a moment’s silence. 

“ You say she hasn’t any family? ” 

Jeffrey nodded. 

“And that she’s rich and nutty?” 

“ Eccentric was my word,” said Jeffrey. 

“And that she can’t get over losing the girl?” 
Richards went on. “ Why, the thing’s as plain as 
the nose on your face.” 

Jeffrey stroked that member thoughtfully. 
96 


AN EVEN BREAK 


“ Well,” he said, “ you’re putting it all over me to- 
day. Perhaps I can work it out after a night’s 
sleep.” 

Richards got up decisively and put on his over- 
coat. 

“ Well, I’ve done theorizing enough for one 
day,” he said. “Now I’m going to get busy.” 

“ I don’t suppose you’d tell us what you are going 
to do for anything in the world,” said Jeffrey. 

“ Oh, I don’t mind telling. I’ve got nothing up 
my sleeve. Everything done in full sight of the 
audience. I’m going to round up those spiritual- 
ists.” 

Jeffrey laughed. “ Good luck to you,” he said. 

There was a step in the corridor outside, a short 
double ring at the bell and a miscellaneous assort- 
ment of letters fell through the mail slot in the 
door, upon the floor inside. 

Jeffrey went over in a leisurely way and began 
picking them up. He always had a large, varie- 
gated and interesting looking mail. But the thing 
that was absorbing his attention just now, was a 
Japanese picture postcard. It absorbed him so 
completely that Richards delayed his farewell and 
both of us stood watching him curiously. 

“ How are you going to find those spiritualists? ” 
he asked at last. “ You’ve put them out of busi- 
ness, haven’t you? ” 

“ Oh, they’re not far away,” said the Lieutenant. 

97 


THE GHOST GIRL 


‘‘ We’ll find them. It may be rather a long job 
from your point of view, but I think we’ll have them 
in a week.” 

“ I’ve a notion,” said Jeffrey, “ that I can help 
you find them.” 

“ Coming to life, are you? ” laughed the Lieuten- 
ant. 

Jeffrey nodded. “Your theory is that my Jap 
has bolted,” he said. “ In other words, that he 
was in cahoots with those spiritualists. Very likely 
they have some other member of his family working 
for them — openly, I mean.” 

“ All right so far,” said Richards, “ but what 
good does that do? I’d rather find three spiritual- 
ists than one Jap. They’re the meanest kind of a 
proposition to lay hands on.” 

“ Here you are, then,” said Jeffrey, and he 
handed the postcard to the Lieutenant. 

I looked at it frankly over his shoulder and was 
as completely puzzled by it as he. It was addressed 
to Togo, to be sure, and postmarked at the Twenty- 
third Street post office here in New York. But, 
on the reverse side, there was nothing at all, but a 
familiar little Japanese picture of Fuji with a few 
snaky trees and a sea-gull or two in the foreground 
and a couple of vertical lines of Japanese characters 
printed on the side. 

The Lieutenant looked at it blankly. “ What’s 
the idea? ” he asked in rich scorn. “ Me to go to 


AN EVEN BREAK 

the Twenty-third Street substation and ask them 
who mailed this, and if he happened to leave his ad- 
dress? ” 

“ IVe an idea that his address is on it,” said Jeff- 
rey. “ Only, unfortunately, I can’t read Japanese.” 

“ Where’s there any Japanese except what’s 
printed down the side here?” 

“ It isn’t printed,” said Jeffrey. “ That’s the 
point. Look at it slantwise and you’ll see, if your 
fingers aren’t sensitive enough to feel it. It’s been 
written on in India ink, in a wonderfully careful imi- 
tation of printing. Let it warm under your thumb 
for a minute and you’ll find it’s sticky.” 

“ What makes you think it’s got anything to do 
with our mystery, even so ? ” I asked. 

“ It’s got to do with some mystery, anyway,” said 
Jeffrey. “A Jap could have dashed off that mes- 
sage in two minutes, writing in the ordinary way. 
This job must have taken him an hour or two. He 
was willing to go to that trouble rather than have 
anyone suspect that Togo was getting communica- 
tions of any sort from, his own people. A sealed 
letter might be opened. A message, that looked 
like a message, might be read. This thing was cal- 
culated to slip by as something too unimportant to 
look at.” 

The Lieutenant was studying the postcard as if he 
couldn’t be quite sure whether Jeffrey was joking 
or no. 


99 


THE GHOST GIRL 


“ You’re the original, self-acting mystery maker, 
all right,” he said. “ What will you bet it doesn’t 
say ‘ J. Shimbashi, Postcards and Novelties, Tokio,’ 
or something of that sort? ” 

“ Find somebody who can read it,” said Jeffrey, 
“ and if it says anything like that. I’ll buy you the 
finest dinner at Churchill’s that you ever sat down 
to.” 

“ That goes,” said Richards in a manner that he 
meant to sound a little heartier and more confident 
than it really was. Jeffrey had a diabolical way of 
hitting it right, even when he founded his guesses 
on such trifling and tenuoqs grounds as this. 

The Lieutenant waved a large hand to us in ami- 
able farewell and took his departure, his footsteps 
resounding in a steady decrescendo as he strode 
down the corridor. 

As soon as he was fairly gone, Jeffrey dropped 
into his big chair, limply, like a man who was tired. 
His failure to follow the policeman’s train of 
thought was so new an experience that it was no 
wonder he took it hard. But he looked as he sat 
there like a man who has just come through some 
exhausting effort. Neither of us spoke for quite a 
while. 

“ I’ve played fair with Richards, I think,” he 
said. “How about it? Do you agree with me? 
It really looks to me like an even break. Only 
each of us takes the line that suits his talents.” 


100 


AN EVEN BREAK 


“ Pm afraid I don’t quite understand you,” said 
I. “ But I do think you played fair with him, 
absolutely. In fact I thought it was mighty good 
of you to give him that hint about the postcard 
when he had been so cagey with you about his ex- 
planation of the portrait — about their reason for 
putting the paint over it, I mean.” 

Jeffrey got up rather suddenly and went to his 
paint-table where he stood with his back to me, busy 
among his colors. 

“ So,” I went on, “ I don’t see how there can be 
any question about your playing fair. But, Jeffrey, 
I believe I see what he was driving at — in a gen- 
eral sort of way — that is.” 

“Do you?” he said in a queer voice. Still he 
didn’t turn around. 

“ Yes,” said I. “ You remember he thought they 
borrowed the portrait in order to help them find and 
make up what he calls a ringer — somebody that 
they can impose on Miss Meredith’s credulity with. 
Well, Jeffrey, suppose they found her — found 
somebody almost miraculously like what Claire 
Meredith must have been. Suppose right in the 
middle of their work that girl disappeared and then 
was found in the ice. Perhaps one of them mur- 
dered her; perhaps they knew someone who is likely 
to have murdered her and were afraid to tell what 
they knew. Anyway, they kept still about it. And 
then, all at once, it occurred to them that it wouldn’t 

lOI 


THE GHOST GIRL 


do to have anyone see that portrait — it would lead 
to too many questions — so they daubed it over with 
paint. I believe that’s Richards’s idea. You know 
he said he was going to round up the spiritual- 
ists.” 

Jeffrey turned round toward me weakly. There 
were tears in his eyes, but they were tears of sup- 
pressed laughter. He shook his head at me and 
wiped the tears away'. 

“ Drew,” he said, “ you will be the death of me 
some day.” 

“ What’s the matter? ” I asked. 

“ Why, you dear old dub,” said he, “ didn’t you 
see that I was pounding away till my arms ached, 
trying to get that idea into that policeman’s thick 
head?” 

“Oh, come!” said I. “Don’t try to work 
through a bluff like that. You were puzzled and I 
think you might admit it. I know you see most 
things quicker than I do, but once in a 
while . . .” 

“ Drew,” he said, “ listen. Do you remember 
that as soon as you told me of the — well, call it 
resemblance of this face here to that of the girl they 
found, that I told Richards decisively how she had 
died of small-pox three years ago; that her rich, 
eccentric aunt was alone in the world and was incon- 
solable over her loss? Could I have done any 
more, short of saying it in so many words, to sug- 
102 


AN EVEN BREAK 


gest to Richards that they meant to impose on the 
old lady with a resemblance? When I challenged 
him to find a reason why the paint had been put on 
this canvas, was there any possible way left open to 
him to explain it, but the way he took? ” 

“ But why didn’t you say it right out? That’s 
what I want to know.” 

“ Because,” said Jeffrey, “ I wanted Richards to 
believe that the idea was really his. I wanted him 
to take it seriously. He’s got an idea that my no- 
tions are fanciful; that I have a lucky way of guess- 
ing. The only way I could make him take that 
notion seriously and could divert him from the other 
course that lay open to him, was by leading him to 
believe that he was getting the better of me — put- 
ting one over on me. I thought that you were on 
to the game all the while. You certainly played up 
to me as if you were.” 

Then he laughed again. 

But for once his mirth couldn’t charm a smile out 
of me. I felt very ill used and rather sulky. 

“ Come,” he said, “ you’ll really have to forgive 
me for that. It was too perfectly delightful to 
hear you going on so seriously telling me all about 
it.” 

“ All right,” said I, “ only the next time you 
really want any sympathy from me, look out.” 

“ I shall get it,” said Jeffrey soberly. “ God 
knows I needed it badly enough this morning, and 
103 


THE GHOST GIRL 


you were there with the goods. I don’t know what 
I should have done without you.” 

“ All right,” said I, “ you’re forgiven. You 
always are. But, Jeffrey, what was the other course 
of action that lay open before Richards? What 
was it you didn’t want him to do? ” 

Jeffrey didn’t answer, but his face became in- 
tensely thoughtful again. 

“ An even break,” he said. “ I honestly believe 
it’s an even break. But we’ll wait and see.” 


CHAPTER IX 


FIGHTING THE DEVIL WITH FIRE 

I WAS just finishing up an afternoon’s work at 
my office a day or two later, when my clerk 
brought me word that Lieutenant Richards of the 
police wished to see me. 

He came in rather impressively and seated him- 
self beside my desk. But, after his first word of 
greeting, he let the better part of a minute go by 
in silence. Underneath his officially omniscient 
manner it was possible to see that he was both puz- 
zled and excited. 

“ Well,” said I at last, to start things, “ who 
pays for that dinner at Churchill’s?” 

He didn’t answer the question directly, but 
brought his big fist down on a heap of documents 
that it took the office boy half an hour to straighten 
out again. 

“ Your friend Jeffrey,” said he, “ is a queer fish. 
He’ll be blind to a fact that’s as plain as the scare- 
heads on the morning edition of an afternoon paper, 
and then he’ll turn round and take a picture post- 
card and find out more from it than the whole De- 
partment could learn in a week.” 

“ He was right about it then? ” said I. 

105 


8 


THE GHOST GIRL 


Richards nodded. “ Are you sure he can’t read 
Japanese?” he asked. 

“ He said he couldn’t,” said I, “ and I’ve never 
had any occasion to doubt his word.” 

“ Well, it beats me,” said the Lieutenant. 
“ That printing was an address just as he said, 
spelled out in some sort of a flowery Japanese way, 
over on East Twenty-second Street. They made 
east with a picture of the rising sun. Can you beat 
it? Well, I had the place looked up and she’s 
there all right.” 

‘‘ She?” 

“ The woman whose other place we raided — 
the one who was doing the materializations. She’s 
a clairvoyant now and crystal gazer. I suppose her 
husband’s somewhere around in the background.” 

“ You haven’t arrested them yet, then,” said 1. 

“ You can’t arrest them yet,” said Richards, “ on 
the murder charge. The thing’s too thin. Of 
course any arrest in connection with that murder is 
going to be a tremendous sensation. And if we 
let the big noise loose before we get our case, we’ll 
probably scare the case away. The thing to arrest 
them on is the charge of extorting money by the 
practice of magic. If they didn’t know we sus- 
pected them in connection with the other thing, we 
might be able to get some valuable admissions out 
of them.” 

“ What’s the difficulty about that course? ” said I. 
io6 


FIGHTING THE DEVIL WITH FIRE 

‘‘ There must be some difficulty or you’d have fol- 
lowed it.” 

“ There is,” said the Lieutenant. “ She’s keep- 
ing very quiet. She isn’t advertising nor holding 
public seances. Nothing that would justify a raid. 
The only way to work it is to get someone to make 
a complaint against her.” 

“ I understand,” said I. “ Someone has got to 
go to her and consult her and pay her money and 
then complain to the police.” 

“ That’s the idea,” said he. “ And the difficulty 
is that they’re so shy and suspicious and they know all 
the investigators so well that they won’t take anybody 
but bona fide clients. And a bona fide client won’t 
complain.’ 

My desk ’phone rang just then and the next 
moment Gwendolen’s voice was in my ear. 

If Gwendolen wanted to be a missionary and go 
about “ scattering sunshine,” as the phrase goes, 
all she’d have to do would be to spend an hour or 
two a day calling people up on the telephone in the 
midst of their business worries and giving them the 
momentary luxury of the sound of her voice. 

“ I’m in your outer office,” she said. “ I came 
down to sign those papers you wanted. It isn’t im- 
portant a bit. But when they told me Lieutenant 
Richards was with you, I couldn’t resist asking 
whether Mr. Jeffrey had been right about the post- 
card.” 


107 


THE GHOST GIRL 

“ Come in,” I said. “ We’re rather at a stands 
still and you may be able to help us out.” 

“ It’s Mrs. Jack Marshall,” I explained to the 
Lieutenant as I hung up. 

He had looked a bit dubious on hearing me invite 
her in, but he lighted up immediately on hearing 
who she was. 

“ The Manicure Girl,” he cried. “ I wish we 
could pin a star on her and make her one of the 
Force. Where we’d have been without her in that 
Marshall case, I hate to think.” 

They greeted each other pleasantly and it didn’t 
take lis two minutes to present our difficulty before 
her. 

She sat smiling in thoughtful silence for a 
moment after we’d done and then electrified us both 
by saying: 

“ I’ll go and consult her myself.” 

“ You wouldn’t want to do that, Gwendolen,” I 
cried. “ An informer’s lot is not a happy one any 
more than a policeman’s. You’d have to go into 
court and appear against a woman and be subjected 
to an examination by a third-rate police court law- 
yer.” 

“ I’ll go,” she said, “ but I don’t promise to make 
a complaint. Perhaps I’ll be so pleased with the 
fortune she tells me that I’ll think I have had my 
money’s worth and sha’n’t want to complain.” 

“ But the complaint’s the thing we need,” said the 
io8 


FIGHTING THE DEVIL WITH FIRE 

Lieutenant. “We can’t do anything till we get it.” 

“ I don’t know,” said Gwendolen. “ Perhaps 
after I’ve talked with her, there may be some other 
way.” 

She smiled again and I saw the outline of that 
other way was already in her mind, though it was 
equally clear that she didn’t mean to tell us what it 
was. 

Richards saw it, too, and he laughed with a sort 
of amused vexation. 

“ You’re almost as bad as Mr. Jeffrey,” he said. 
“ You want the police to leave the thing alone until 
you’ve tried your hand at it.” 

“ Oh, no,” said Gwendolen. “ You can do any- 
thing you please. Only I thought you said you 
couldn’t arrest her without an informer.” 

“ Well, you’ve got me,” the Lieutenant admitted. 

“ I shan’t have to ask you to wait more than a 
day or two,” she told him. 

Then she got up, nodded to me, said the papers 
could wait and in another minute was gone. 

It only needed a glance at Gwendolen’s face, 
when I came home that night, to convince me that 
she had made good her word, so far as her promised 
visit to the spiritualist went. But when I looked 
from her face to Jack’s, I could see that he didn’t 
approve at all of his pretty young wife’s taking any 
more police problems on her shoulders, and I sus- 
pected him of wishing I’d kept her in the dark 
109 


THE GHOST GIRL 


about it Well, I more than half agreed with him. 

“You’ve been to see her?” I asked. 

She nodded and laughed. 

“ And do you feel you’ve got your money’s worth 
out of the fortune she told you, or are you indig- 
nant enough over the swindle to inform the police 
and have her arrested? ” 

“ The fortune certainly wasn’t worth two dol- 
lars,” said Gwendolen. “ I could tell a better one 
myself with the grounds of a cup of tea. All about 
a dark man and a blonde man — oh, but it was silly I 
But she seemed to feel that that sort of fortune- 
telling didn’t amount to much herself and, when I 
got very sympathetic, she told me, in a very spectral, 
blue-lighted sort of way, that her real work was in 
acting as a medium for communications from the 
other world. She wanted to know if any of my 
loved ones had passed into the beyond, and said if 
they had, she could help me to communicate with 
them. I got very interested and trembly myself 
and asked if I couldn’t come to one of her seances. 
She said she wasn’t giving them any more — not 
publicly, at least — on account of the police. 

“ Then we both waited a minute and at last I 
asked her if the spirits would come anywhere she 
wanted them too, because then we could have a pri- 
vate seance somewhere where the police wouldn’t 
dare come. She said she could do it all right, but 
it came rather high. 


no 


FIGHTING THE DEVIL WITH FIRE 

“ Introducing spirits into a private house seems 
pretty expensive business. It’s going to cost thirty 
dollars. And Jack thinks that’s awfully extrava- 
gant.” 

“Extravagant!” Jack snorted angrily. “It’s 
the only silly thing I ever knew Gwendolen to do.”- 

“ But what is she going to do? ” I asked. 

“ Why, she’s going to bring that woman here — 
here I — To-morrow night, for a seance in this 
house. I wish you’d try to bring her to reason. I 
can’t.” 

“ I want you all to come,” she said. “ Madeline 
won’t. She says she’s going to spend the night at 
the Crosbys’. I think that’s just an excuse. But I 
want you, and Mr. Jeffrey — oh, and Lieutenant 
Richards. I want you to call him up. Cliff, and in- 
vite him.” 

At the mention of Richards’s name. Jack fairly 
blew up. 

“What on earth are you thinking about?” he 
demanded. “ We’ll look nicely in the papers the 
next morning, shan’t we? I should think you’d had 
enough of that sort of thing.” 

“ There won’t be anything in the papers,” said 
Gwendolen rather coolly. “ I should think you 
knew me well enough to have a little more confi- 
dence in me than that.” 

“ But, Gwendolen,” I expostulated, “ if you have 
that woman arrested here in our house for conduct- 


III 


THE GHOST GIRL 


mg a seance, I don’t see how you can keep it out of 
the papers. On the whole, I’m inclined to agree 
with Jack. You’d better have nothing to do with it. 
Richards will find a pretext in a day or two for ar- 
resting her.” 

“ She won’t be arrested for conducting a seance,” 
said Gwendolen. “ That’s not the plan at all.” 

“ What is it, then? ” I demanded. 

She was silent a moment before she answered, 
then she said: “No, I’m not going to tell you. 
You might make all sorts of objections. You just 
come to the seance — it will be down in the library 
— at eight o’clock to-morrow night, and see what 
happens. I promise you that you won’t be sorry if 
you do, and that you will be sorry if you don’t. 
That’s fair. And now, if you still tell me to let it 
all go and pretend I never went to see her — never 
heard of her. I’ll do as you say.” 

“ Jack’s got the casting vote,” said I. “ It’s his 
house and it’s his wife. What do you say. Jack? ” 

He laughed. “ Oh, I haven’t the nerve to tell 
her not to do it,” said he. “ A husband’s authority 
is all very well, but it’s an awkward thing to exer- 
cise it on anybody who’s as likely to be right as 
Gwendolen.” 

“And you’ll come?” she asked. “And you’ll 
let me have Lieutenant Richards?” 

“ That’s the bargain, isn’t it? You’re to run the 
show. We’ll obey orders and no questions asked.” 


IT2 


FIGHTING THE DEVIL WITH FIRE 

You’re a dear,” she said. “ IVe half a mind 
to tell you all about it. But it will be ever so much 
more fun for you, if I don’t Will you call up the 
Lieutenant, Cliff?” 

The Marshalls’ library was a big, rather for- 
mally arranged room, with a fireplace in one end, 
between a pair of bookcases, and opposite it, at the 
other end of the room, another pair of bookcases 
with a mirror between. It was very dignified and 
rather solemn for an everyday family lounging 
place. I rather wondered at Gwendolen’s choice 
of it, for it seemed to me that it, more than any 
other room in the house, was unfitting for her pur- 
pose. It would be almost profaned by a piece of 
charlatanism such as Gwendolen proposed to have 
take place there. But we had agreed to ask no 
questions. 

The next evening, at eight o’clock, we all gath- 
ered there, except, of course, Richards, who had to 
keep in the background until the lights were out 
and the seance fairly begun. 

The medium herself was a rather rotund person, 
with a peculiarly disagreeable voice and a pasty 
complexion. Her cabinet, which was nothing but 
a wooden frame two feet square or so and seven 
or eight feet high, stood in the corner of the room 
behind where the medium was sitting. A little to 
the right from it was a small portable organ, which 
was apparently to be presided over by the medium’s 


THE GHOST GIRL 

assistant. Jeffrey and I exchanged glances when 
we saw that he was unmistakably a Japanese. 

Jeffrey, Jack, Gwendolen and I sat around in a 
semi-circle opposite the medium. Jeffrey’s chair 
was at the end, within reaching distance of the old 
library table which had been moved over to the side 
of the room to leave sufficient space for our circle. 

There was a little doorway at the end of a sort 
of narrow alcove which led into the back hall. This 
door was left unlatched and we had taken the pre- 
caution to oil the hinges. When things were fairly 
started, Richards was to come down to this door and 
station himself where he could observe events and 
take any action that they might render appro- 
priate. 

I had attended seances many times before and 
had long ago learned that they were always exactly 
alike, so that it was with no thrill of excitement or 
expectancy that I took my seat and waited for 
things to begin. Jack shared my feelings, and 
both he and I were puzzled to account for the de- 
meanor of the other two. Of course such things 
might be new to Gwendolen, but even novelty alone 
couldn’t have given that added color to her cheeks 
nor quickened her breathing. As for Jeffrey, he 
was as excited as she, though all he showed of it, 
under a studiously repressed demeanor, was an edge 
to his quiet voice. We were all very hushed and 
decorous, as the etiquette is at such gatherings. 

114 


FIGHTING THE DEVIL WITH FIRE 

The lights were all turned out except the spark 
from one hylo which had been provided for the 
purpose. The Japanese went to the organ and 
began racking our nerves with hymn tunes frightfully 
out of key, both literally and figuratively, for we 
all had associations with them that made the cheap 
trickery of the present occasion jar badly on our 
nerves. After he had played a while, the medium 
began to talk, her throaty unpleasant voice fittingly 
accompanied by the rasping wheezes of the little 
organ. Her English was as bad as her voice, and 
her vulgar platitudes and her supposedly mystic 
jargon were worse than either. After a little in- 
troduction she began to ask questions, with the per- 
fectly obvious purpose of getting data for the com- 
munications we were waiting for. Gwendolen was 
the only one of us who was either inventive enough 
or sufficiently interested to make replies, but these 
were evidently encouraging to the medium, for she 
warmed to her work. 

There were a few preliminary manifestations, the 
muffled jangle of a bell, and some thrummings on a 
badly tuned guitar, and then suddenly, in a moment 
of stillness, a thin, childish voice spoke out of the 
empty air. It was pretty well done and if I had not 
been waiting for it and been perfectly acquainted 
with the trick of ventriloquism by which the medium 
herself produced it, it might have startled me. 

“ That’s my control,” announced the medium in 

115 


THE GHOST GIRL 


her own voice. “ Now if any of you have any ques- 
tions to ask of any of the departed, Bright-eyes will 
give them power to speak and perhaps to appear be- 
fore you. But I warn you to sit absolutely still in 
your places as a single move might have serious re- 
sults.” 

There was a moment of silence, if the faint drone 
of the organ does not forbid the use of the word, and 
then Gwendolen spoke. 

‘‘ I wish to communicate with someone,” she said. 
“ She passed over on the nineteenth of December.” 

It was perhaps ten seconds before the medium 
answered. I wasn’t thinking so much about her as 
I was about the date; there was something vaguely 
familiar about it. 

“ What was the name of your friend? ” the me- 
dium asked. 

“ She never told me her name,” said Gwendolen, 
“ but she will know who I mean by what I can tell 
about her.” 

“ What can you tell, so that Bright-eyes can know 
who is called? ” 

“ She was very beautiful,” said Gwendolen, and 
already the thrill of her voice was beginning to in- 
fect me with a new excitement. “ She was young, 
about my own age, I think, and she had wonderful 
masses of beautiful blond hair.” 

The organ stopped playing and the silence gave 
the situation a new thrill. I felt a current of air 

ii6 


FIGHTING THE DEVIL WITH FIRE 


stirring about my feet as if someone had opened a 
door. 

The thin childish voice spoke now again, but 
somewhat uncertainly, as if the throat that uttered 
it were contracted with a sort of unreasoning fear. 

“ It is not enough,’’ it said. “ I must know 
more.” 

“ The girl I want to communicate with,” said 
Gwendolen steadily, “ was frozen in the ice of the 
river. She had been murdered.” 

It was a long half-minute before the childish voice 
spoke again. It was fainter still this time, and be- 
fore it was half through the sentence, it had died 
into a rasping whisper. 

“ There is no answer,” it said. “ The spirit does 
not know who is called.” 

It needed the grip of Gwendolen’s hand on my 
forearm to keep me in my chair. Because across the 
room, opposite where I sat, and almost behind the 
medium, there came a glow of bluish light. And in 
the midst of it, apparently itself the cause of it, ap- 
peared a face. 

“ But it has come,” said Gwendolen. “ She is 
here. Look!” 

Her voice was not loud but it rang like a bell, not 
in terror but in triumph, and as she said the last word 
she let go my arm and pointed. 

For a moment the medium sat without moving, 
almost as if frozen herself and unable to move. 
117 


THE GHOST GIRL 


But no one can resist the command of a finger point- 
ing behind one, and slowly, unwillingly, but irre- 
sistibly, she turned. 

What she saw there at the far end of the room, 
shining in the bluish light it seemed itself to be the 
cause of, was the pale ethereal face and the shining 
golden hair the blue light silvered, of the dead mys- 
terious unknown girl the police had found frozen in 
the ice two months ago. 

The woman looked at it dully for a moment. 
Then she clutched suddenly at her neck with both 
hands. The next moment she screamed piercingly, 
and fainted. 

There was a rush and the sound df a scuffle by the 
door. Jeffrey turned on the lights, and we saw a 
strange man struggling out of Richards’s grip, not 
toward the door but toward the woman who lay un- 
conscious on the floor. 

“ Let go of me, damn you,” he said. “ I’m not 
trying to get away. Let me go to her.” 

He kneeled beside her, for a moment, without 
paying any further attention to us, but presently, 
when he found her regaining consciousness, he looked 
up and frowned at us across her body. 

“What have you been doing to her?” he de- 
manded. “ You might have killed her. If you had, 
you’d none of you have got away from me. What 
did you do to her? ” 

The woman drew in a long gasping breath. “ It 


FIGHTING THE DEVIL WITH FIRE 


was the face,” she said faintly. “ It was Irene’s 
face. I saw her looking at me.” 

“Where did you see it?” he asked unevenly. 

“ There,” she said, and she pointed toward the 
big mirror that stood between the bookcases. 

We all followed the man’s eyes as he turned about, 
but what he saw, and all any of the rest of us saw, 
was our own pale astonished faces reflected there. 

He turned back to her. “ Can’t you forget 
that?” he asked. “Can’t you ever forget it? 
What was Irene Fournier to you? ” 

Jeffrey walked over to Richards and held out his 
hand. 

“ Congratulations, Richards,” he said. “ It looks 
as if you were right about it, after all.” 


CHAPTER X 


THE FIRST CONFESSION 

I F the circumstances had not been so grim, I should 
have laughed aloud. Richards was the most ut- 
terly bewildered looking man I ever saw and the 
gasp with which he received Jeffrey’s congratula- 
tions was funny enough to draw a smile from any- 
body. But the hysterical woman on the floor and 
her husband’s anger over what we had done to her, 
the perfectly genuine devotion that existed between 
the two, sobered us a little. 

“ We cannot ask her any questions now,” said 
Gwendolen decidedly. “ Let’s go into the billiard 
room and give her time to get herself together.” 

The idea was so exactly contrary to police tradi- 
tion, that Richards started to protest. 

Now is just the time! ” he said. “ We can get 
anything out of her now.” 

Jeffrey grinned. “ All right,” he said, “ go 
ahead and question her yourself.” 

But Richards didn’t know what to ask her. He 
hadn’t caught up with the situation at all. He gave 
a rather disgusted grunt and turned away. 

“ Do as you like, of course,” he said. “ Show the 
police how much more you know than anybody else. 
120 


THE FIRST CONFESSION 

Go out and leave them alone to make a get-away 
through that window there.” 

“ Haven’t you got an officer here,” asked Gwen- 
dolen, “ that you can put on guard for a little while 
so that she can get quiet before we question her? ” 
“ Yes,” said Richards, ‘‘ we can leave her and her 
husband together to frame up a perfectly good ex- 
planation of everything.” 

“ That’s the idea,” said Jeffrey. “ That’ll do 
first-rate.” 

Richards gave it up. “ All right,” he said. 
“ Come along.” 

He called in a policeman, instructed him simply 
to watch the pair and see that they didn’t get away, 
and the rest of us adjourned to the billiard room, as 
Gwendolen had suggested. 

“ I want to know,” said Richards, when the door 
was closed behind us, “what it was all about? 
What made the woman scream? I caught the man 
as he made a rush from the cabinet, but I didn’t see 
what happened at all. And who was the Irene 
Fournier they were talking about? ” 

“ That,” said Jeffrey, “ appears to be the name of 
the girl who was found frozen in the ice. It looks 
as if you had the right hunch. It’s perfectly evi- 
dent that they know about her.”^ 

“ And what did you do ? ” asked Richards. 
“What made the medium scream like that? ” 

“ We had a materialization,” said 1. “ Who pro- 


9 


I2I 


THE GHOST GIRL 

duced it, I don’t know. But we saw the face of the 
girl who was frozen in the ice — the face we saw in 
the portrait up at Jeffrey’s studio the other day. 
The rest of us saw it before the medium did. When 
she turned around and looked, she made a queer 
noise in her throat and screamed and fainted. You 
know the rest. But how the trick was worked, if it 
was a trick, I am as much in the dark as you.” 

Jack turned to his wife. “ It was a trick, wasn’t 
it, Gwendolen? ” he asked. 

She nodded and gave a little shiver. “ I hate to 
remember that woman’s scream,” she said. “ I 
don’t believe I’d have planned it, if I had realized it 
would affect her like that.” 

“ Tell us about it,” I said. “ How did you come 
to think of it? ” 

“ Why,” said Gwendolen, “ I’ve always heard 
that most Spiritualists believe, in a way, in their 
own magic. Of course they know that what they do 
is just a trick, but they believe, in the back of their 
minds, all the time, that there is something really be- 
hind it. When I talked to her the other day, I saw 
that she was like that. We talked together for a 
long time and it was perfectly clear that down in the 
bottom of her mind, she thought there was something 
in it. 

“ So I thought that if we were to produce what 
looked like a materialization, play a trick on her — 
the same kind of trick that she plays on other peo- 


122 


THE FIRST CONFESSION 

pie, she would be — well, startled Into admitting 
something. But I didn’t dream It would terrify 
her like that. Mr. Jeffrey agreed with me, that If 
she did know anything about the girl they found in 
the ice, the trick would probably work.” 

“ But how did you work the trick? That’s what 
I want to know. It’s the ghastliest thing I ever saw. 
I was frightened myself and I believe Jack was.” 

He nodded. 

“ Oh,” said Gwendolen, “ that was Mr. Jeffrey’s 
idea. The thing I thought of was ordinary in com- 
parison. The thing I thought of was to borrow 
his portrait and have It hidden behind a curtain 
somewhere and then draw the curtain. But his plan 
was so much better, that I doubt if mine would have 
worked at all. He deserves the credit for it.” 

Then we all turned to Jeffrey. 

“ Why, It was simple enough,” said he, “ If you 
happen to know a little about parlor magic ; Irridium, 
that’s the answer. You paint a little film of Irridium 
on the back of a plate of glass and It has the prop- 
erty of being opaque to reflected light and transpar- 
ent to transmitted light.” 

“ Well? ” said Richards. 

“ Why, we chose the library for the seance,” said 
Jeffrey, “ because It has a mirror in It — a big mir- 
ror. We took that out and set my portrait In be- 
hind It and hung a bluish-white electric light over It. 
Then we replaced the mirror with a sheet of plate 
123 


THE GHOST GIRL 


glass painted with irridium. As soon as there was 
light in front of it in the room and none behind it, 
it made as good a mirror as if it had been silvered. 
But as soon as we turned out the light in the library, 
as of course we knew the medium would do, it was 
possible to make the portrait show through the glass 
by turning on the light behind it. I had the thing 
wired so that I could put on the current gradually 
and work the switch from under a litter of papers 
on the library table. As soon as the woman 
screamed, I turned off the light, just before you 
turned up the lights in the library. Of course, when 
you did that, the glass became a mirror again and 
the portrait was hidden.” 

“ So the medium still thinks,” said I, “ that she 
really saw Irene Fournier’s face. She hasn’t dis- 
covered the trick.” 

“ They use irridium mirrors a lot themselves,” 
said Jeffrey, ‘‘ and she may think of it in time, or 
her husband may. But I don’t think they have 
thought of it yet. So I’d suggest,” he con- 
cluded, “ that we bring them in here and question 
them.” 

Richards had already started toward the door to 
put this suggestion into effect, when an exclamation 
of Jeffrey’s halted him. We all turned to look 
at him and saw an expression of perplexity and vex- 
ation in his face. 

“ What’s the matter? ” I asked. 


124 


THE FIRST CONFESSION 

“The Jap!” said Jeffrey. “What became of 
him?” 

“The Jap!” I echoed. 

“ The man who was playing the organ,” said 
Jeffrey. 

And at that we all stared at each other blankly. 

“ He was playing the organ all through the 
seance,” said I, “ and then when we turned up the 
lights, he was gone.” 

“ No,” said Gwendolen, “ don’t you remember 
how much more impressive everything got when I 
asked for the girl who was frozen in the ice? Don’t 
you remember how still it was? The organ had 
stopped playing then.” 

“ You’re right,” I corroborated. “ I remember 
now feeling a draft of cold air. I thought it was 
Richards opening the door.” 

“ I had the door open as soon as the lights were 
out,” said Richards. 

“ Well, we’ve lost him,” said Jeffrey. “ That 
may be important, and it may not. We’ll know 
more about it when we’ve questioned the medium 
and her husband. He may simply have smelled 
trouble and got away, without having any other vital 
reason for doing so. Anyhow, he’s gone. Let’s 
have the others in.” 

Richards had already turned toward the door to 
carry out Jeffrey’s suggestion, when we heard a 
sound that froze us in our places for a moment — 
125 


THE GHOST GIRL 


held us staring at each other and then galvanized 
us all into sudden activity. 

All sorts of sudden sounds are compared with the 
muffled throb of a revolver shot, but really nothing 
else sounds just like it and there is no question about 
the real thing when you hear it. 

As Richards flung open the door, we heard the 
officer we had left on duty calling for him, and as 
we ran out pell-mell into the hallway, our nostrils 
were greeted by the pungent, acrid tang of gun- 
powder. 

When we got into the library, we saw Barton — 
the medium’s husband, lying on the floor bleeding 
profusely from an ugly looking wound in his neck. 
His wife was bending over him and the policeman 
had hold of her. 

My first thought was that they had made some 
sort of concerted attack on him and that it was he 
who had fired. But the sight of a dainty little silver 
mounted revolver on the floor, a yard or two away 
from where the man was lying, put an end to that 
idea. One of our prisoners had fired the shot. 

Jack rushed to the telephone to call a doctor and 
the rest of us gave our first attention to the wounded 
man. He had fainted and his condition gave us a 
bad scare for a minute or two. But we soon came 
to the conclusion that the wound was not a fatal one. 

“Who did it?” asked Richards of the officer as 
soon as there was time for such a question. 

126 


THE FIRST CONFESSION 


“ I don’t know,” said the policeman. “ The two 
of them were over there in the corner with their 
heads together, talking away in low voices so that 
I shouldn’t hear what they said. The first thing I 
knew, I saw a flash and heard a shot. I don’t 
know where they got the gun from or who fired 
it.” 

The woman had paid absolutely no attention to 
any of us. Her white face, as she bent over her 
husband’s body, showed no more expression than if 
she had been turned to stone. But, after hearing 
the policeman’s answer to Richards’s question, she 
spoke in a voice as expressionless as her stony 
face. 

“ I shot him,” she said. “ But I didn’t mean to. 
I was trying to shoot myself, when he caught hold of 
the barrel of the revolver.” 

You know that anything you say may be used 
against you? ” said Richards. “ It’s my duty to tell 
you that.” 

“ I am going to say something,” said the woman, 
“ and you can listen as hard as you like and use it 
all you please. That’ll be better than. . . .” 

Richards glanced round at the policeman. “ Wait 
a minute,” he said. “ This isn’t the time to talk. 
We’ve got to look after your husband.” 

The police detective who looks forward to land- 
ing a big crime is as fearful of interference, as nerv- 
ous lest someone else get the credit away from him 
127 


THE GHOST GIRL 


as a reporter who thinks he has a scoop. Richards 
didn’t mind us. We couldn’t get the credit away 
from him in any case. He was afraid of the police- 
man. 

The doctor for whom Jack had telephoned lived 
just around the corner and came almost immediately. 
It was at Gwendolen’s suggestion that we had the 
wounded man taken to a spare bedroom, instead of 
calling for an ambulance. That was a rather wel- 
come way out of the difficulty to Richards as well as 
to ourselves. For a different set of reasons, we 
dreaded publicity about equally. 

Gwendolen took charge of our new patient until 
a regular nurse could arrive and Jack went along 
with her. Jeffrey and I accompanied Richards back 
into the library, where the policeman had detained 
the woman. Richards sent him out to stand guard 
outside. He examined the revolver in silence before 
he began asking any questions. 

It was a dainty, small caliber weapon, hardly the 
sort that a man would think of carrying about with 
him. 

“Where do you carry this?” was his first ques- 
tion. 

The woman answered by pointing, without a 
word, to an inner pocket in the coat of the rather 
mannish looking tailored suit she wore. 

Richards went over to her, turned the coat back 
and looked critically at the lining around the pocket. 

128 


THE FIRST CONjFESSION 

It was perfectly evident that she was telling the 
truth. The line formed by the edge of the cylinder 
was worn there clear across. 

“Been carrying it for some time, then?” said 
Richards. 

“ Yes,” said the woman sullenly. 

“ When did you first know Irene Fournier? ” said 
the Lieutenant. 

I began to get a better impression of Richards’s 
powers. Compared to Jeffrey, he had always 
seemed downright stupid. But that question was 
cleverly put. I felt perfectly sure that Richards had 
never heard that name until the woman herself cried 
it out on seeing the vision in the mirror, and yet his 
tone had the assured, contemptuous authority of one 
who could have given her police record from the 
time she was fifteen. He strengthened this effect a 
moment later, after waiting in silence for the woman 
to answer his question. 

“ It was hard luck for you when you did meet her 
— whenever it was — wasn’t it?” 

In words, the woman answered only the first part 
of the Lieutenant’s speech, but the expression of 
hatred on her face was a sufficient commentary on 
the second part of it. 

“ I met her along last October,” she said. 

“Well,” said Richards, “how did it happen? 
How did you get to know her? ” 

“ She drove up to the house one day in a taxi,” 
129 


THE GHOST GIRL 


said the woman. “ I thought she was some swell 
come for a reading. I thought she’d be a pretty 
good subject, too, she looked so innocent with those 
big soft eyes of hers, as if she’d believe anything you 
told her. The first thing that surprised me about 
her, was her talk. She looked like an American all 
right, but she talked with a foreign accent — French, 
I guess, and the name she gave us had a French 
sound.” 

“Fournier?” said Richards. “How did she 
spell it? ” 

The medium spelled it out for him. 

“That’s French, isn’t it? ” said Richards, turning 
to Jeffrey, who nodded. “ Well,” said Richards, 
“ did you give the woman her reading? ” 

“ She didn’t want one,” said the medium. “ She 
wanted to rent our top floor. Said she liked the 
neighborhood and wanted to live quietly. I said 
I’d have to see my husband about that and called 
him in. And he agreed to let her have the rooms 
right off.” 

“ She was all alone? ” asked Richards. “ Hadn’t 
she a maid or anything? ” 

“Why — yes, she was alone,” answered the 
woman. “There was a Jap who came to see her 
every day. They’d have long talks together. It 
seemed as if she was giving him orders. He never 
had any talk with any of us.” 

“ He was the man who was playing the organ — 
130 


THE FIRST CONFESSION 

this evening, and who beat it when he heard we were 
asking about her,” said Richards. 

He didn’t say it like a question and the woman 
made no answer. Not even a gesture of assent or 
denial. 

“ You and your husband got pretty well ac- 
quainted with her, didn’t you?” said Richards. 

The woman nodded. “ We took her into part- 
nership with us for a while,” she said. 

“ How did that happen? Was she a medium? ” 

“ No, but she used to give us tips.” 

“ Tips ! ” I repeated. 

“ About people,” the medium explained. “ Folks 
who had come to consult us, or who we could get to 
come. And it was queer how much she knew that 
we didn’t, and we make a point of knowing a good 
deal. She told us about Miss Meredith. We’d 
never even heard of her. It was Irene told us she 
was rich and queer and all broken up about the loss 
of a niece of hers. She told us they were having 
the girl’s portrait painted. She said she thought 
she could get the portrait for a day or two, for a 
look at it, so that we could get ready for the old 
lady. 

“ It was then the talk came up of her going in 
partnership with us. It was the next day Miss 
Meredith came. We hadn’t done anything about 
trying to land her. I suppose Irene had, though 
I never knew. She drove up in a carriage, with a 

131 


THE GHOST GIRL 

heavy veil on, and said she wanted a reading. I 
was going to give her one, because I knew already 
from what Irene had told me, enough to make a 
good beginning. But Irene wouldn’t hear of it — 
made us send her away; tell her we were too busy 
and make an appointment for her early the next 
week. She said that was the way to impress those 
people — treat them as though you didn’t care any- 
thing about them. We got the portrait the next 
day. The Jap brought it in.” 

“Did you know where Irene got it?” Richards 
asked. 

“ No,”^ said the woman. “ She said she’d bor- 
rowed it and that we could keep it a week safely 
enough. It was the most wonderful thing I ever 
saw. It almost frightened me. And my husband 
felt the same way about it.” 

“ How was that? ” asked Richards. 

“ Why,” said the woman, “ it might have been 
painted from Irene herself. We both of us looked 
at it and said that if Irene only had the dress, she 
might have walked straight out of the picture. She 
said she thought she could get the dress and the next 
day she had it. I don’t know how she did that, 
either.” 

“ You gave Miss Meredith a materialization the 
next time she came? ” 

The woman nodded. “ We didn’t dare let her 
see too much,” she said. “ We were afraid she’d 
132 


THE FIRST CONFESSION 

go right out of her head. We just gave her a little 
glimpse in a dark light. But that was enough.” 

“ Well? ” said Richards. “ Go on. How many 
more times did Miss Meredith come? ” 

“ She never came again,” said the woman. “ She 
made an appointment, but she didn’t come to keep 
it.” 

“Why do you suppose that was?” asked Rich- 
ards. 

“ I don’t know,” said the medium. 

“Hadn’t Irene any suggestion or explanation?” 

“ Irene disappeared the next day herself.” 

“ What day was it she disappeared,” asked Rich- 
ards, “ do you remember the date? ” 

“Yes,” said the woman. “It was the 27th of 
November.” 

“ That must have been quite a shock to you and 
your husband,” said Richards. “ Didn’t you make 
any inquiries? Didn’t he make any effort to find 
her? ” 

“ No. Why should he? We had nothing to do 
with her really. She didn’t owe us any money or 
anything. She came and stayed a while and went 
away. It was none of our business.” 

“ She was pretty valuable to you in your business, 
wasn’t she? ” 

“ Oh, yes,” said the woman, “ But we could get 
along without her. We don’t need any help from 
anybody.” 


133 


THE GHOST GIRL 


“ .You couldn’t hope to do much with Miss Mere- 
dith without her, could you? Not as much as you 
could with her, anyhow?” 

“ Miss Meredith never came back, I tell you, so 
it didn’t matter.” 

“ Do you ordinarily let people go as easily as 
that — people that are once fairly hooked, especially 
when you know they are rich? ” 

“ Well,” said the medium, “ we couldn’t do any- 
thing without Irene, could we? ” 

“ So you passed it all up,” said Richards, “ and 
didn’t think anything more about Irene till you saw 
her picture in the papers — the girl they had found 
frozen in the ice.” 

The woman nodded. 

“Why didn’t you come across, then?” asked 
Richards. “ Why didn’t you tell us who she 
was? ” 

“We didn’t owe you any favors, did we? ” said 
the woman. 

“You knew you were in wrong with the front of- 
fice,” said Richards. “ We were pulling joints like 
yours all over town. You had a chance to get strong 
with us. If you’d given us the right tip about Irene 
Fournier, you could have gone on as you were and 
we’d never have bothered you. You must have 
known that. Why did you let the chance go by? ” 

“ I don’t know.” 

“ You and your husband talked it over, did you,” 

134 


THE FIRST CONFESSION 

said Richards, “ and neither of you thought of 
that? ’’ 

“ No, we never thought of that.” 

“ Why didn’t you return the portrait when Irene 
went away? ” 

‘‘ How could we? We didn’t know where Irene 
had got it.” 

All the while the Lieutenant had been asking his 
questions, I had sat beside him watching the woman, 
puzzling over her sullen, half defiant replies. What 
she said hung together well enough, but the manner 
of her saying it was big with potential falsehood. 
What was the thing she was keeping back — the 
thing that would account for her scream at the sight 
of Irene’s face and for that unexplained revolver 
shot that had changed the face of things so sud- 
denly? 

I wished that Jeffrey had been paying a little 
closer attention. After Richards asked a question or 
two, he had lounged over to the window and stood 
there looking out, without the slightest sign of any 
interest in the proceedings. I wondered if his in- 
difference were real or if it concealed, as it some- 
times did, the materials for one of those intuitive 
flashes of his that used to make us all wonder at him. 
I wasn’t left wondering long. 

“ By the way. Lieutenant,” he said, and he didn’t 
even trouble to look around as he spoke, “ when 
was it you raided these people? ” 

135 


THE GHOST GIRL 

Richards frowned thoughtfully and began think- 
ing back. 

“ Let’s see,” he said. “ It was a few days after 
New Year’s — the fourth — That’s right, isn’t it? ” 

He asked the question of the woman, but she didn’t 
answer. 

“ And you got them both? ” asked Jeffrey. “ The 
woman’s husband as well as herself? ” 

“ Sure,” said Richards. 

“ Your husband must have got home two or three 
days before that, then,” said Jeffrey, turning now 
for the first time to the woman. 

‘‘ Got home,” she said. “ What do you mean? ” 
Her face had turned suddenly white and her eyes 
were staring. 

“ Fully three days before that,” Jeffrey went on 
quietly. “ Because the paint was perfectly dry on 
the canvas when the police raided you. You didn’t 
paint out the portrait until after he came back.” 

“I — don’t know what you mean,” gasped the 
woman, “ about his coming back. He’d never been 
away.” 

“ Oh, yes, he had,” said Jeffrey. There was more 
pity in his voice than anything else. “ How else 
could he have found out that Irene had been mur- 
dered. The paint was dry on the canvas the fourth 
of January. They didn’t find Irene’s body until 
the eighth, and it had been frozen in the ice for 
two weeks. When was it your husband went 
136 


THE FIRST CONFESSION 


away? The same day Irene did, or the day after? ” 
It was a full minute before the woman answered. 
She just sat there while Richards and I stared 
at her, her hands fumbling at her neck, as if some- 
thing were suffocating her. 

Jeffrey turned away again, but when she did speak, 
her words brought him around like a flash. 

“ It wasn’t him that killed her,” she said. “ He 
didn’t do it. I swear he didn’t do it. I killed Irene 
Fournier myself.” 


10 


CHAPTER XI 

AN ESCAPE 


HOSE were the last intelligible words we got 



1 out of her. Richards pressed her with ques- 
tions for a while, trying to get some details as to how 
the crime she confessed to had been committed and 
where and why, but wholly without result. The 
woman was half hysterical, but she had self-control 
enough left to keep her jaw locked and her lips 
tight together and the only answer she ever made 
was a desperate, frantic wagging of her head, which 
might have meant anything. 

So at last we called a taxi in preference to a patrol 
wagon, for Richards and the policeman to take her 
to the station in. While we were waiting for it, 
he arranged to send a plain-clothes man up to the 
house to keep an eye on the husband. The pre- 
caution seemed rather unnecessary, both because he 
was too badly wounded to make any serious attempt 
to escape and because his wife’s confession seemed 
to do away with the motive for it. 

While we were waiting for the taxi to arrive, 
Richards explained his theory of the crime to us. It 
was the typical police view, but it seemed to me to 
hold water; though I had a feeling that Jeffrey 


138 


AN ESCAPE 


didn’t look at it like that. Evidently Richards 
shared this impression, for he tried hard to convince 
Jeffrey that he was right about it. 

“It is all explained now, isn’t it?” he said. 
“ This Irene comes to the house, settles down there 
and gets friend husband buffaloed. She was a good 
enough looker to do it, that’s sure. He gets loony 
about her and the two of them run off. Wife left 
behind. She gets on the warpath; follows them up. 
Finds them together somewhere and takes a shot at 
the home destroyer. Maybe she leaves her husband 
to get out of the fix as best he can — maybe she 
helps him. He can’t denounce her, so he comes back 
to her or with her, I don’t know which yet. Any- 
how, they’ve got to stand by each other. When she 
sees Irene’s face in the mirror, she goes off her head 
and tries to kill herself. There you are ! ” 

He wheeled round on Jeffrey, whose face was still 
thoughtful and who had given no sign of assent. 

“What’s the matter with that?” Richards con- 
cluded. “ Doesn’t that explain everything? ” 

“Do you think it does?” asked Jeffrey. 
Richards threw up his hands with a gesture of ex- 
asperation. “ Now, look here,” he said. “ I sup- 
pose you’ve got some dinky little silver-mounted 
theory that you’re on the trail of and that you’ll try 
to show up the police with again. All right, go 
ahead. IVe got a confession and I’ve got a motive 
and I’ve got a story that holds together. And that’s 
139 


THE GHOST GIRL 


[good enough for me. If you think you can get any- 
thing better before this woman’s case comes to 
trial. . . 

“ It will never come to trial,” said Jeffrey. 

“ All right,” said Richards. “ You wait and see. 
lYou go your way and I’ll go mine. I’ll leave you 
alone and you leave me alone. Does that go? ” 

Jeffrey laughed and patted him on the back. We 
were standing in the hall watching for the taxi, and 
as Jeffrey spoke, its lights flashed round the corner. 

“ Two to one. Drew,” he said, “ that the Lieu- 
tenant pays us a call within a week.” 

Richards was too indignant to make an articulate 
answer. But it was a grunt that spoke volumes. 
The policeman led the woman down the hall just 
then and the three of them went out together. 

“ All the same,” said Jeffrey, as he closed the 
door behind them, “ I wish there was a chance that 
the Lieutenant was right about it. But there isn’t. 
Not a chance in the world.” 

After the Lieutenant had gone, he favored me 
with another prophecy and a bit of advice. 

“ You’d better forget all about this case for the 
next few days,” he said to me. “ Get back to your 
office and make up for lost time. Nothing’s going 
to happen for a few days — nothing, at least, that 
you need bother about. But at the end of that time, 
I suspect I shall be calling you in again. And 
when I do, I shall keep you pretty busy. So dig 
140 


AN ESCAPE 


down to a clean desk, if you can, before that time.” 

I took the hint and followed his advice as well as 
I could. Of course we had Barton still in the house, 
making as good progress toward recovery as a man 
could be expected to make from that sort of an in- 
jury. But he was under the care of two men nurses 
and orders were that he was not to be allowed to 
talk anyway, so it was comparatively easy for me to 
forget about him — easier, I suspect, than it was for 
Gwendolen. 

Equally, of course, I did think about it a good 
deal, especially on the daily trips up and down town 
from and to my office, trying to solve the puzzle — 
trying to see what it was that Jeffrey saw that made 
him so sure that Richard’s theory of the case was 
wrong; so sure the case would collapse in the Lieu- 
tenant’s hands that he could calmly predict a further 
appeal for help from him within a week. Nothing 
but the direst necessity would bring Richards to our 
doors again after what had passed between him and 
Jeffrey and I honestly didn’t believe he’d come. 

As I counted off the days, my feeling of skepticism 
mounted steadily. It was just at the end of the 
sixth, as I was preparing to leave my office and go 
home to a peaceful family dinner, that the voice of 
my office boy over the desk phone, announced that 
Lieutenant Richards had come and wished to see me. 
I told them to send him in, with a recurrence of the 
feeling I had often experienced before, that there 
141 


THE GHOST GIRL 


was something uncanny about Jeffrey. You could 
talk all you liked about lucky guesses and the balance 
of probability, without wholly shaking off a feeling 
of almost superstitious dread, when his prophecies 
came true like that. 

Perhaps this one hadn’t come true, though. Per- 
haps Richards had come to gloat over us. Why 
had he come here though, I wondered? Why didn’t 
he go to Jeffrey himself? 

One look at his face disposed of that alternative, 
before the big policeman had fairly shut the door 
behind him. 

“ Isn’t he here yet? ” he asked. 

“ Do you mean Jeffrey? Why should he be 
here?” 

“ I’ve been trying to get hold of him for two 
days,” said Richards. ‘‘ This noon I got word by 
telephone — an out of town call — saying that he’d 
meet me here at five o’clock.” 

“For two days ! ” I exclaimed. “ I didn’t know 
he had left town.” 

Richards nodded sourly. 

“ How about it? ” I asked. “ Does Jeffrey win 
his bet again? Is it for help on the Fournier case 
that you want to see him? ” 

“This thing’s past a joke,” said Richards, as he 
noted the smile with which I asked the question. 
“ It’s all very well to keep things to yourself and let 
other people go chasing wild geese, but when it’s an 
142 


AN ESCAPE 

important murder, that sort of smart Aleck business 
is dangerous.” 

I didn’t point out to Richards that he had deliber- 
ately refused Jeffrey’s help six days ago, because I 
knew he remembered it as well as I did. Besides, 
I was intensely curious and I wanted him in a good 
humor. So I placated him, as well as I could, with 
kind words and a good cigar, and his complaints 
subsided into a mere occasional rumbling of protest 
that Jeffrey was keeping him waiting. 

“ It isn’t quite five o’clock yet,” I said. But just 
as I spoke, there came a single tap on the bell in the 
self-winding clock that sets itself every hour, and 
Jeffrey walked in. 

He nodded at me and grinned at the Lieutenant. 

“ Well,” he asked cheerfully, “ how goes it? ” 

“ Damn bad,” said Richards, “ and you know it.” 

His grievance was wide-awake again in a minute. 
“ It seems to me,” he went on, “ it’s pretty dangerous 
business letting the police go off hunting a mare’s 
nest and leaving the real murderer that much better 
chance to escape, when you knew all the while the 
woman had an alibi.” 

“Had she an alibi?” said Jeffrey. “That’s 
lucky.” 

“ Do you mean to say you didn’t know it? And 
what do you mean by saying it’s lucky? ” 

“ I do mean that I didn’t know it,” said Jeffrey. 
“ And it’s obviously lucky, for nothing else would 

143 


THE GHOST GIRL 


have convinced you that you were on the wrong 
tack. Was it a good alibi? ” 

“ Copper-riveted/’ said Richards. “ The woman 
never left town at all — the Barton woman. Irene 
Fournier went away and Barton went away. But 
Mrs. Barton never left her house all the while.” 

“ Making it highly improbable,” commented Jeff- 
rey, “ that she shot a lady who was fifty miles away 
at the time.” 

“ She had the lady’s revolver, though,” said Rich- 
ards. “ The gun she shot her husband with a week 
ago.” 

“ A week ago to-morrow,” Jeffrey reminded him. 

But Richards ignored the thrust. “ Well, that 
was Irene Fournier’s revolver.” 

“ By the way,” said Jeffrey, “ what is the caliber 
of that weapon? ” 

“ It’s a 28,” said Richards. “ Why? ” 

“ I don’t know. Curiosity.” 

“ Now, look here,” said Richards. “ I’ll say any- 
thing you want me to say, admit anything you want 
me to admit, but I want you to stop this nonsense 
and tell me what you know about this murder.” 

“ That’s easy,” said Jeffrey. “ I don’t know a 
blessed thing. I hope to, though, within a day or 
two.” 

“ Try again,” said Richards. “ You can’t get 
away with that. You just said you didn’t know the 
Barton woman had an alibi. Well, then how could 
144 


AN ESCAPE 


you be so dead sure she hadn’t murdered Irene Four- 
nier, in the face of her own confession that she had, 
unless you knew the person who really had done 
it?” 

“ Why, I simply had a theory. . . Jeff- 

rey began. 

“ What I want is facts,” interrupted Richards. 
“ I’ve got a theory of my own.” 

“ What is it? ” asked Jeffrey. 

“ I’m not going to tell it,” said the Lieutenant, 
“ until you come across with some of the facts that 
I am sure must be in your possession.” 

“ Oh, well,” said Jeffrey, “ then I’ll tell you what 
your theory is. Irene still figures as the home de- 
stroyer. She deliberately infatuated Barton and ran 
away with him. The two quarreled; Barton found 
out something about her past, perhaps grew jealous 
of some other lover, and killed her. Then he came 
home to his wife — confessed to her perhaps, or 
perhaps not. Anyhow, he painted out my portrait 
on the canvas Irene had ‘ borrowed.’ Perhaps his 
wife guessed from that, when the body was discov- 
ered.” 

“ He did paint out the portrait all right, that’s no 
theory,” said Richards. “ I know the shop where 
he got his paints and brushes.” 

“ All right,” said Jeffrey, “ that strengthens the 
case. Well, it preyed on the Barton woman’s mind, 
until when she saw Irene’s face appear in the mirror, 

145 


THE GHOST GIRL j 

she blew up, made a scene, got her husband into i 
really serious danger and then made a confession to | 
eet him out of it. That's about the size of it, isn't i 

it?" I 

“Well," said Richards, “have you got a better 
one?" 

“ I don't know that I have a better one," said 
Jeffrey, “ only that one doesn't seem to me quite 
conclusive." 

“What's the matter with it?" demanded Rich- 
ards. 

“ Why, to begin with, there's Barton himself. 
Barton's distinctly middle-aged, he's getting a little 
fat, his hair’s thin on the top. . . ." 

“ Don’t talk nonsense," said Richards. 

“ It isn’t nonsense," said Jeffrey. “ I don't quite 
see why Irene should be so anxious to run away with 
him." 

“ He’s just the kind pretty young women run 
away with," said Richards. 

“ When they happen to be millionaires or some- 
thing of that sort. But Barton — why, he’s just his 
wife's understudy. I can’t see why Irene should 
want him. And then, for the other half of the pic- 
ture, look at Irene herself. Do you remember what 
Mrs. Barton said about the first time she saw her? 
Irene drove up in a taxi; she was dressed smartly 
enough so that Mrs. Barton thought she was some 
swell come for a reading. Now, when an adven- 
146 


AN ESCAPE 


turess of her looks and her attainments starts out to 
make a capture, she’s likely to aim rather higher than 
poor Barton. It’s inconceivable that she fell in love 
with him, and I don’t see that she had much to gain 
by running away with him.” 

“ Well, you never can tell about a woman,” said 
Richards philosophically. 

“ I dare say you can’t.” 

“ All right, have your little joke,” said Richards. 
‘‘ But the fact is she did run away with him.” 

“ Not from him? ” suggested Jeffrey. 

“ Play it either way,” said Richards, ‘‘ it comes to 
the same thing. He knew what happened to her, 
anyway, before anyone else did. He came home and 
painted out that portrait four days before the body 
was found.” 

“ Yes, there’s something in that,” Jeffrey admit- 
ted. 

“ There’s everything in it,” said the Lieutenant. 
“ It looks good to me.” 

He turned to me. “ I’m going to send up and 
have him taken to the jail hospital this evening. It 
won’t do to take any chances.” 

My ’phone rang just then. I picked up the re- 
ceiver, then turned and handed the instrument to 
Richards. “ It’s someone for you,” I said. 

“ Yes, I’m Richards,” we heard him say. Then 
he looked puzzled. “ Who’s this talking, anyway. 
Oh, Brown — yes — I get you. Well, what is it? ” 

147 


THE GHOST GIRL 


I glanced at Jeffrey and he met my eye with 
a nod. Brown was the name of one of the two men 
nurses Richards had supplied us with to look for 
Barton. 

The Lieutenant’s face suddenly went purple. 
“ What’s that? ” he roared through the ’phone. 
“ When? When did it happen? ” 

There was another long silence at our end of the 
conversation, but there was no mistaking its import. 
Richards’s dark eyes were flashing and his big fist 
beating impatiently on his knee. 

“ I don’t care whose fault it was,” he roared pres- 
ently. “ Have you reported to headquarters? ” 

He hung up the receiver with a jerk, without 
waiting for more than a bare word of reply and 
swung round and glared at Jeffrey. 

‘‘ This is a nice kettle of fish,” he said. They’ve 
let that fellow get away.” 

“Barton?” I asked. 

Richards grunted assent. 

“Well, we’ll get him,” he said. “He won’t get 
far. But I’ll tell you this.” He turned on Jeffrey 
again. “ You can sit here and theorize all you like 
and grin your head off, but I am going to catch the 
man who murdered Irene Fournier. I’m through 
with theories.” 

“ Oh, no, you aren’t,” said Jeffrey. 

Richards turned on his heel without another word 
and stamped out of the room. 

148 


AN ESCAPE 


Jeffrey waited until he heard the outer door slam 
after him, then lighted a fresh cigarette. 

“ I see the force of your objection,” said I, “ but 
you can’t get away from that confession. The 
woman wouldn’t have made a lying confession for 
anybody but her husband.” 

“ Oh, she thinks he did it,” said Jeffrey, “ and 
maybe he did. But when it comes to confessions, 
I’ve heard one myself, no longer ago than last night.” 


CHAPTER XII 

THROUGH THE GRILLE 

A CONFESSION I ” I cried. “ Something to 
do with this murder? Where did you get it? 
Who did you get it from? ” 

“ I’ll tell you all about it,” said Jeffrey. “ I’d 
like to see what you think. Because I never was 
more puzzled in my life.” 

He smoked half the cigarette before he said any- 
thing more. I sat still and waited. I knew 
what he had to tell me would be worth waiting 
for. 

“ But if you and Richards think,” he began again, 
“ that I’ve been ‘ lying on flowery beds of ease * 
spinning theories, you’re very much mistaken. I’ve 
been doing the grimiest kind of detective work, in- 
cluding an attempted burglary. I’ve been scared, 
at a conservative estimate, out of three years’ 
growth. I’ve followed false leads — Oh, Richards 
would sympathize with me, if he knew the whole 
story.” 

‘‘Why didn’t you tell him?” I asked. 

“ I’m not ready yet,” said Jeffrey. “ You’ll see 
plainly enough when I get through.” 

“ You said you followed a false lead,” said 1. 
150 


THROUGH THE GRILLE 


Were you looking up the woman, too — the Bar- 
ton woman? ” 

“ No,*' said Jeffrey. “ I had to have some color 
of probability about what I was looking for. That 
Barton woman’s confession wouldn’t have deceived 
a child. No, I started in on the Jap.” 

“ The man who played the organ at the seance? ” 

Jeffrey nodded. “ It cost me four solid days,” 
he said, “ and got me nowhere. Oh, it was inter- 
esting enough in itself and it did throw an interest- 
ing sidelight or two on Irene Fournier’s character, 
but it doesn’t unlock our mystery. That fellow’s at 
the head of a regular secret service — a sort of 
blackmail syndicate. He’s as much feared in cer- 
tain quarters, as any man in New York. I got a 
hint from Richards himself, when I realized what 
an unhealthy lot Togo knew about my affairs. 
Everybody treats Japanese servants like that. We 
know so little about their concerns, that it never 
occurs to us that they’re taking an interest in ours. 
But the Japanese is a born spy. It’s perhaps the 
most conspicuous talent he possesses. This fellow 
had genius enough to organize it. There are thou- 
sands of Japanese servants in this country and ap- 
parently a good proportion of them report to this 
chap. The spiritualists and divorce-while-you-wait 
lawyers ‘would be nowhere without him. 

“ But he seems to have met his match in Irene. 
She used him to hook Miss Meredith and to get my 

151 


THE GHOST GIRL 


portrait and she must have had some hold on him, 
or she wouldn’t have dared play fast and loose with 
him the way she did. Evidently she gave him the 
slip completely. He stayed on with Mrs. Barton, 
apparently in the hope of picking up the trail there 
again. Even after he discovered that Irene was 
murdered, he evidently hoped to pick up something 
big in a blackmailing way. I doubt if he thought 
Barton did it, or the game wouldn’t have seemed 
worth the candle. But it is equally evident that 
he thought Barton knew some things that would 
interest him. 

“ There, I am inclined to agree with him. We 
may run across him again or we may not. My 
guess is that he pulled out of the affair altogether 
when he found us in it. He took up four perfectly 
good days of my time, anyway.” 

Jeffrey fell into another long, thoughtful silence 
and finally I prompted him. 

“ Well,” said I, “ what did you do next? ” 

“ The next thing I did,” said Jeffrey, “ was to 
get that frame back from the decorator who stole 
it and pay the poor devil a hundred dollars. 
Under the law, I believe that’s compounding a fel- 
ony. But it’s making a friend, anyway, and that’s 
more important. I mounted the portrait in the 
frame, had it boxed up, wrote Crow a note telling 
him that I was sending it to Miss Meredith’s town 
address and that I would call the next day — that’s 
152 


THROUGH THE GRILLE 

yesterday. I said in the note that I was very anx- 
ious to see Miss Meredith, as I thought I had some 
things to tell her that would interest her. I told 
him that I understood that he hadn’t felt it wise, 
heretofore, that an interview should take place be- 
tween Miss Meredith and myself, but that I thought 
there were important reasons why he should re- 
verse his decision. I made it as clear as I know 
how, that I meant business.” 

“ Just the thing, I should think, to put him on 
his guard,” said I, “ if he’s got any subterranean 
reason for avoiding such an interview.” 

“ Exactly,” said Jeffrey, with a nod. “ I meant 
to put him on his guard. I got a polite note from 
him by a special messenger late that same afternoon, 
saying that Miss Meredith would be glad to see me. 
When I got that, I put a suit of pajamas in a bag 
and caught the night boat up the river.” 

“You what! ” I exclaimed. 

“ Of course,” he said, “ if I really meant to see 
her, I shouldn’t have written any note. I’d have 
taken the portrait in a taxi and gone to the house 
without any warning. I felt pretty sure that when 
he knew I was coming, he’d send Miss Meredith 
out for a drive, or convince her that she wasn’t 
strong enough to leave her bed; receive me himself 
when I called, and entertain me with a polite excuse 
that I couldn’t possibly quarrel with. By that 
means, he’d get the portrait, which undoubtedly he 

11 153 


THE GHOST GIRL 


wants, and at the same time, deprive me of any 
excuse for repeating my visit.** 

“ Then you didn’t want to see Miss Meredith,** 
said I. 

“ Why, yes. I*ve wanted to see her for some 
time. But there was something just then I wanted 
more. Drew, do you believe in the atmospheres 
that hang about places? I don’t know that I be- 
lieve in them myself, but I feel it. I wanted to see 
the country house where Miss Meredith lived — 
the place where I understand she stayed all last 
summer and late into the fall. Do you know 
where it is she lives? ** 

“ I don’t believe I do,” said I. 

Jeffrey looked at me fixedly. “ She lives,” he 
said, “ at a place called Beech Hill. It’s ten or 
twelve miles from Silver Springs — up the river 
from Silver Springs.” 

“ There’s something familiar about that name,” 
said I, “ but I don’t place it.” 

“ Silver Springs,” he said, “ is where that ice 
cutter found the body of — well, we’ll go on calling 
her Irene Fournier for a while yet, just to be on 
the safe side.” 

“ Jeffrey,” I gasped, “ you don’t mean that Irene 
Fournier is only another name for . . . ? ” 

“ For Claire Meredith? No, I don’t mean that 
yet. I mean exactly what I say. That, for the 
present, we’ll go on calling her Irene Fournier.” 

154 


THROUGH THE GRILLE 


“ And Beech Hill, Miss Meredith’s country 
place, is that — near the river?” 

Jeffrey nodded. “ About ten miles up, as I 
said.” 

The suggestion fairly made my head spin. I 
cast my mind back in an endeavor to fit the facts 
we had about her — about the mysterious vision 
Jeffrey had had in Paris, with this new theory of 
his. He saw what I was doing and interrupted 
me. 

“ Don’t stop to think yet,” he said. “ Listen ! 
That old house — Beach Hill — has been drawing 
me like a magnet. I didn’t know exactly what I ex- 
pected to find there, but I knew, as well as I knew 
anything, that if I could prowl around there by my- 
self — if I could get into that old house on any 
pretext, or on no pretext at all, and see the back- 
ground to the picture, that some of the things that 
must have happened in the foreground of it would 
begin to soak through. Richards would laugh at 
that, wouldn’t he? But I tell you. Drew, it’s gos- 
pel truth.” 

“ But why in the world, if that was what you 
wanted, did you make the appointment with Miss 
Meredith? ” 

Jeffrey gave his head the little shake I was so 
familiar with. 

“ It does seem rather a fool thing to have done, 
because I suppose I might have anticipated exactly 
155 


THE GHOST GIRL 


what happened. Of course what I wanted Is plain 
enough. I wanted to give Crow something to 
amuse himself with. I wanted to make sure that 
he’d be In town that day on the job. I had an 
Idea that he’d been showing a certain amount of 
Interest In my movements lately. I didn’t want 
him opening the front door when I rang the bell at 
Beech Hill, prepared to tell him that I was a house 
agent or something of that sort, and I thought my 
note the surest way of nailing him down in New 
York.” 

“ You don’t mean to tell me,” I exclaimed, “ that 
he outguessed you, figured out what you meant to 
do and got to Beech Hill ahead of you? ” 

“ No, he didn’t do that. He did a perfectly 
obvious thing — a thing so obvious that I never 
thought of It. But wait! Let me tell you the 
story In order. 

“ My first plan was to take the evening train up 
to Oldborough, spend the night there and drive out 
to Beech Hill In the morning. But, at the last 
minute, I changed my plan. I saw by the papers 
that they’d just started running the night boats up 
there and that offered several advantages. It cut 
out both the railway statidn and the hotel — two 
good places to avoid If you’re also trying to avoid 
observation. And then the fog on the river, these 
first mild days. Is good to look at. I generally 
sleep pretty well on anything that’s moving, so I 
156 


THROUGH THE GRILLE 

counted as another advantage, a good night’s 
sleep.” 

He laughed ruefully. 

“ Didn’t you get it? ” I asked. 

“ I got,” said he, “ what I really think was the 
most horrible, abominable night I ever had in my 
life. I tried to go to bed early to begin with, and 
that’s always a mistake. Got into my bunk, turned 
out the light and began waiting for sleep about two 
hours before its scheduled time to arrive. 

“ There couldn’t have been many passengers, 
but, with the typical intelligence of his class, the 
purser put me in a stateroom next to one that was 
occupied. There was nothing but a thin wooden 
partition between, going up to within six inches of 
the ceiling and that space was left open and grilled 
for purposes of ventilation. Though what is 
gained by ventilating one stateroom into another, 
I never could see. I noticed before I turned off my 
light, that one piece of the wire grille was broken 
and had been taken out. I had a notion to ask for 
another room, but I hate to act like a fidgety old 
woman when I travel, so I made the best of it and 
went to bed. 

“ The adjoining stateroom was dark at that 
time, the occupants of it having evidently come 
aboard early and gone to bed. Because I heard a 
murmur of voices even then — two women’s voices. 
Nothing they really said came through, for they’d 

157 


THE GHOST GIRL 


evidently noticed my light and were talking low on 
purpose. But the inflections of one voice were 
somewhat commanding and the other a little bit 
servile. Some lady and her maid, I judged them 
to be, or companion. 

“ Well, the sound of their voices was rather 
soothing than otherwise and the throb of the boat 
was rather pleasant. I got my muscles relaxed 
and my pillows comfortable, and was, I thought, 
on the point of pitching off to sleep, when I heard 
a thin little tittering laugh. It came from the next 
stateroom. Drew, there was something horrible 
about it. You may think that’s imagination, or 
nerves — post impressionism developed from some- 
thing that happened afterwards. But I tell you it 
wasn’t. The sound of that laugh made my blood 
run cold. It wasn’t loud nor prolonged — nothing 
like the bursts of maniacal laughter that Jane Eyre 
used to hear, but, somehow, it didn’t belong with 
those quiet, wellbred voices I heard. It was as dis- 
connected as if it had been a phonograph record. 

“ I sat up in my bunk with the sweat standing out 
all over me. There was a rustle in the next room 
that sounded as if someone was getting out of the 
upper berth, and then the quiet voices went on 
again. Well, I lay down, swore at myself and told 
mysdf to go to sleep. But it wasn’t two minutes 
before the laugh came again. It wasn’t any louder 
this time, but it lasted longer and the repetition 

158 


THROUGH THE GRILLE 

didn’t make it any the less horrible. I heard one 
of the voices after that, but the other didn’t speak 
• — one of the two natural voices, I mean. Pretty 
soon, though, another voice spoke. The same voice 
that had laughed, spoke through a horrible sort of 
giggle. 

“What it said was — ‘Dead! She’s dead,’ and 
then it laughed again. 

“ The one natural voice that was left, began talk- 
ing in a soothing sort of way, but the laughing voice 
went on, paying no more attention than — well, 
that’s the only simile I can think of — a phono- 
graph. It had something of that quality, too. 
That horrible, lifeless squeak. 

“ The light went up in the other stateroom then. 
Of course it shone perfectly plain through the 
open space at the top of the partition and that re- 
lieved the situation a little. It seemed to make it 
possible for me to stay there. I confess I had been 
on the point of bolting when it was turned up. I 
heard the clink of a spoon against glass, too, and 
that suggestion that someone was getting a dose of 
medicine had a quieting effect on my nerves, too, 
although the medicine itself didn’t affect the patient 
immediately. The phonograph voice went on for 
quite a little while, just saying over and over again 
— ‘ Dead 1 She’s dead,’ and giggling. 

“ But presently its tone got more querulous. 
The giggle stopped. ‘ I guess I ought to know 

159 


THE GHOST GIRL 


she’s dead,’ it said. ‘ I killed her myself. Killed 
her with a pin.’ Then it got a note of terror in it 
and made a dry, choking little cry. ‘ I killed her, 
I tell you. I! I! I!’ 

“ It kept rising higher and higher almost to a 
shriek and then suddenly it stopped in a muffled 
gasp, as if the nurse — if the sane person present 
in there was a nurse — had clapped something over 
its mouth. Perhaps a pillow. I suppose the medi- 
cine took effect then, because that muffled gasp was 
the last sound I heard. 

“ But by that time I wanted some of the dope 
myself pretty badly. A maniac is not a pleasant 
person to encounter at the best, but somehow, not 
seeing anything, just hearing through that little 
wooden partition, made it all the worse. 

“ I was a fool not to get up and dress and go on 
deck. But I’ve got a spunky sort of streak in me 
that hates to admit that I’m beaten and I made up 
my mind to put myself to sleep by main brute 
strength of will. I lay still and kept my eyes shut 
and tried to keep my muscles relaxed. 

“ I suppose it was two hours before anything 
more happened, though it seemed six. The next 
thing that happened was this : ” 

Jeffrey got out of his chair and shook himself 
with a little laugh. 

“ Oh, it would have been funny, if my nerves 
weren’t so near the breaking point. I suppose it 
i6o 


THROUGH THE GRILLE 


is funny still. But I was lying there perfectly still, 
hadn’t heard a sound, and all at once, something 
like a tiny hand — oh, smaller than a baby’s, no big- 
ger than a doll’s, but very cautious and skillful, — 
took hold of one of my eyelids and tried to lift it. 

“ I don’t mind admitting I yelled. I was out of 
bed and had the light on in about the sixteenth of 
a second and of course for five seconds after that 
I couldn’t see anything because the light blinded 
me. Gradually I got my eyes in focus and there, 
squatting on a corner of my bunk, right beside the 
pillow — oh, it was nothing horrible ! — it was a 
baby raccoon, brown and fluffy, with its long pointed 
nose and its bright shiny little eyes pointed straight 
at me. 

“ For a minute or two I couldn’t get my bearings 
— couldn’t understand how the thing could have 
got in. The grating over the window was intact. 
And then I thought of the broken grille opening 
into the next stateroom. I looked around and saw 
the light had gone up in that room, too. They had 
probably been aroused by my yell. Well, it would 
have aroused anything but the dead. I felt foolish 
and that made me feel furious. I moved over to- 
ward the little beast somewhat too suddenly and it 
scuttered away, jumped up on the washstand and 
from there on top of the mirror and disappeared 
through the broken grille, all in about a second. 

“ I waited for a scream from there, because, of 

i6i 


THE GHOST GIRL 


course I couldn’t be sure the little beast was at 
home there. But evidently it was, for they took 
his coming quietly enough. 

“ Well, I didn’t turn out the light after that, but 
I got back into bed and pulled up all the blankets, 
because I was cold all through. I had never been 
so terrified in my life. The possibility of going to 
sleep after that never occurred to me. But pres- 
ently the gray of the dawn began to come in and 
that is the signal for insomniacs the world over. 
The first thing I knew the steward was rapping on 
my door telling me it was seven o’clock. 

“ When I had got up and dressed and before I 
left the boat, I took a look into the next state- 
room, but it was perfectly empty; the bed all made 
as if no one had been in there for a week. I felt 
like the devil after the night I had had and had 
half a mind to give up my trip and take the next 
train back to New York. 

“ But I thought better of it, hired a team of 
horses and surrey and drove out to Beech Hill.” 


CHAPTER XIII 


BEECH HILL 

1 SAW by my driver’s look, when I told him 
where I wanted to go, that he knew about the 
place and after I had sized him up with a little 
casual talk, I blessed my stars that I had been able 
to get him. He was a Simon pure native of 
those parts and what he didn’t know about local 
gossip wouldn’t be worth listening to. 

“ The Meredith’s must have furnished a good 
part of that gossip themselves, for certainly they 
had been a queer, eccentric family for several gen- 
erations — a self-willed, imperious, high-tempered 
lot at the best, with a little streak of insanity, or 
near it, cropping up now and then, that made the 
worst of them very bad indeed. 

“ It’s good blood though, as such things are 
reckoned in most countries. They have always 
bred to their class. But the only other member of 
the family in the direct line and in Miss Meredith’s 
generation, — a younger brother of hers, — was an 
exception to the rule. It seems he was artistic in his 
tendencies and showed a good deal of talent as a 
painter in an amateurish sort of way, lived abroad 
a lot — mostly in France — and scandalized his 
163 


THE GHOST GIRL 


family by marrying a Normandy peasant girl. 
That’s the instinct of the overbred everywhere. 
Nature’s way of reasserting herself. 

“ This woman — Claire’s mother — must have 
been a perfectly glorious creature to look at. Cer- 
tainly Claire came honestly by those great masses of 
pale gold hair that people went so mad about. I 
wish you could have heard my driver’s attempt to de- 
scribe her. The up-state native isn’t naturally 
rhapsodic, and his attempts were really amusing. 

“ Well, It seems Meredkh brought his wife home 
and the other members of the family were properly 
superior and Indignant, especially his sister, and the 
poor young wife just withered up under it. Meredith 
himself doesn’t appear to have been a very strong 
sort of character. Certainly his sister was all the 
man of the family. She had all the business sense 
and, as she shared equally with him In the family 
fortune to begin with, she actually managed, ac- 
cording to the driver’s gossip, to get hold of the 
lion’s share of It. 

“ Meredith was killed racing an Ice-yacht on the 
river, when Claire was six or seven, and his wife 
didn’t survive him very long. So his sister came 
back to Beech Hill and took charge of the estate 
and of Claire. She must have brought the child 
up under an Iron rule and that sort of thing gen- 
erally works badly In the end. Then, as Crow ad- 
mitted to you, she terrorized the rest of the family 
164 


BEECH HILL 


■ — there are no end of rather distant cousins, you 
know, Crow among them — got fearfully bored 
with life, and at last closed up Beech Hill and her 
town house and went off to Europe. 

“ That, as I remember it, was when Claire was 
about fifteen. Miss Meredith never came back to this 
country, even for an occasional visit, until about three 
years ago. She came back alone, of course, and the 
story was that Claire had died of small-pox in Paris. 
Since she came back, she has been dividing her 
time between her town house and Beech Hill, 
though she hasn’t done it in the ordinary way. She 
spent a good many winter months up there all alone 
with Crow, for nobody has ever been invited to the 
place since she came back, and of course her odd 
way of living has set all the gossip afire again. 

“ I got all of that, practically all of it, out of 
the driver. As a matter of fact, I had to pump him 
about something to keep him from pumping me. 
The story I told him was that I had been told by 
a New York real estate agent, that the place might 
be for sale and I wanted to look at it. I told him 
that, in order to find out, if possible, if there was 
any intention of selling it, and found out, what 
isn’t at all surprising under the circumstances, that 
there was. At least he had driven one or two other 
prospective purchasers out there. So that made my 
plan rather easy. 

“ When we got to the boundaries of the estate, 
165 


THE GHOST GIRL 


I paid his fare and sent him back, telling him that 
I wanted to wander around outdoors a bit before I 
went to the house and that I’d trust to luck for 
means of getting back. I wanted to make sure of 
seeing something anyway. And, as it turned out, 
it was well I did. 

“ Before I had been wandering around the place 
for half an hour, my desire to buy it was genuine, 
even if my intention wasn’t. Drew, it’s perfectly 
lovely — fields, lawns, woods, the lie of the land, 
the glimpses you get every now and then of the river 
and of the distant banks. It’s hard to beat, I tell 
you. It was all so lovely in its first-hint-of-spring 
way. It almost made me forget the grim sort of 
errand I had come on. I skirted around through 
the woods, got myself mired and mold stained to 
the knees and finally started down toward the river 
bank along a little path I found. The path was 
muddy and wet, for the snow couldn’t have melted 
off earlier than the day before, yet I could see that 
it must be lovely a little later when the green things 
came out. 

“ But, Drew, I hadn’t more than started down 
that path before I began thinking about the murder 
again and I got a sort of hint of the reason when 
I saw where the path was taking me. It led down 
to a white painted boathouse on the bank. The 
sight of that made the sensation come back twice 
as strong. If I was right in connecting Beech Hill 

i66 


BEECH HILL 


with the tragedy, if Irene Fournier had gone once by 
a different name altogether, and I had made the 
right guess as to what that name was, then the 
chances were that it was along this path that the 
body had been carried and it was here, at this little 
landing, that it had been put into the river. I could 
even go further than that. The winter had set in 
suddenly very soon after the body had been put into 
the water. The spring had only just come. It 
wasn’t unreasonable to suppose that the last person, 
before myself, to come down that path and step out 
on the little boat landing, had been the person who 
carried the body in his arms.” 

“ Jeffrey,” I cried, “ wasn’t there some clue — 
some real clue?” 

He shook his head with a grim laugh. “ Some- 
thing that Richards would have called a clue, do 
you mean? A wisp of blond hair caught in a 
splinter on the gunwale of a boat, or a blood- 
stained handkerchief, or a rag of white satin caught 
on a thorn bush beside the path? No, there was 
nothing like that.” 

“ I don’t see any reason why there shouldn’t 
have been,” said 1. 

“ There isn’t any,” he admitted, “ and I confess 
I looked for something like that. But this is all 
I did see. The boathouse is a substantially built 
affair on concrete piles. The windows on both 
sides were fitted with solid shutters and the sliding 
167 


THE GHOST GIRL 


door with a good lock to make it really difficult for 
a marauder to get in. It needed to be, for it con- 
tained a high power motor boat, that might very 
well be stolen or borrowed for a joy ride. The 
house is built around a slip, so that the boat could 
come into it under its own power. When I saw it, 
it was hoisted out of the water on slings, for the 
winter.” 

“ How did you get in, if it was as well locked 
up as that? ” 

“ I said it had a lock, not that it was locked. As 
a matter of fact, the sliding door was only partly 
shut. It had got oif its rollers as sliding doors will, 
and the last person to try to shut it, hadn’t bothered 
to fix it. It gaped open about eight inches. It 
had been like that all winter, too, judging by the 
drift of half melted snow and ice that had got in- 
side. I squeezed inside and looked around. 

“ The person who had laid up the launch for the 
winter wasn’t the one who had left in such a hurry, 
judging by the shipshape way he had done his job. 
But there was another boat in there that had evi- 
dently been out since. It was a small river skiff 
and it lay listed over on the floor of the boathouse, 
just far enough in to clear the door, though there 
was a pair of slings for it, too. The person who 
had dragged it in hadn’t even bothered to unship 
the oars, a thing that almost any boatman would 
have done from force of habit. The boat had been 

i68 


BEECH HILL 


brought in by someone who was in a hurry. I 
think even Richards would be willing to admit 
that.” 

“ But was there nothing else? ” 

“ There was this.” Jeffrey’s eyes narrowed 
thoughtfully. “There was a long painter on the 
boat, one end of it made fast as usual to a ring in 
the bow. The other end had been tied around the 
forward thwart and then cut. Do you see what I 
mean? Twenty-five feet of the painter was fast 
to the bow ring. Five feet of the same rope was 
still tied around the forward thwart. Both ends 
were cut clean as if they had once belonged 
together.” 

He gave a sort of shiver then and stopped. 
Then seeing that whatever sinister significance lay 
in the fact was still not apparent to me, he set his 
teeth and explained. 

“ The boat was pretty small for that sort of 
freight. Perhaps the murderer had never meant 
to use a boat. He brought the body down and 
threw it in from the landing. And then he saw 
that the current wasn’t going to carry it away. It 
was caught in an eddy, perhaps. So he got out the 
boat and rowed over to it. He must tow it out into 
the channel. He passes the painter around it, 
under the arms, perhaps. His boat drifts away 
from it a little before he has time to make the line 
fast about the body. He doesn’t want to handle it 
12 169 


THE GHOST GIRL 


any more than necessary, so he simply makes the 
other end of the painter fast to the thwart, the for- 
ward thwart, mind you, because he’s got to tow back- 
wards, and pulls away out into the channel. When 
he gets out there, he tries to untie the line, but cuts 
it instead to save time. You can guess that he’d 
be in a panic of haste by then, and rows back to the 
boathouse. There’s the picture ! Can you see 
it?” 

“ I can see it, as you describe it to me in that 
convincing way of yours. But do you suppose 
Richards could see it, too?” 

Jeffrey smiled ruefully. “ I shouldn’t even want 
him to. A man who could see pictures like that 
would be much too flighty for the force. There 
are probably a dozen hypothetical explanations of 
everything I found there at the boathouse, that 
would cover the case as well as the picture I see. 
But I do see this one. Drew, plainer than I can 
make you understand, and I believe it’s true. 

“ When I went up the path again, bound for the 
big house this time, I scrutinized it pretty closely. 
I suppose Sherlock Holmes would have found no 
end of clues, and by the time he’d reached the 
veranda of the house, would have been able to tell 
the whole story of the crime. Just where every- 
body had gone and how fast they walked and 
whether they were right- or left-handed and whether 
their shirts were custom made or not. But I didn’t 
170 


BEECH HILL 


find anything, except here and there a pair of wheel 
tracks. They were narrow gauge, no wider than 
a child’s express wagon, but the wheels themselves 
were broad, nearly two inches, I should say. In 
some of the shady parts of the path, where the 
ground was still frozen hard, the tracks were there, 
frozen in, so I knew they must have been made be- 
fore the freeze. 

“ At the end of ten minutes’ walking, the path 
bent around over the crest of a little ridge and gave 
me my first view of the house. I stopped a minute 
and looked it over. It was a rather rambling 
structure, two stories high, composed roughly of a 
series of L’s, jutting out to catch the southwest 
breeze on one side and to give the windows and 
terraces on the other a view of the river. The 
architecture was a little too good to be true. In 
other words, it had been made into something a 
little more strictly colonial than anything they really 
built in the colonial days. It looked rather deso- 
late and austere, as such a place is likely to look 
when it isn’t occupied by enough people to keep it 
tolerably full. 

“ It wasn’t boarded up, though, and that was a 
relief; because I had fully determined to break in 
if there were no other way of accomplishing my 
purpose. But as long as there was a caretaker 
there, the purpose would be vastly easier of accom- 
plishment. 

171 


THE GHOST GIRL 


“ The path I had been following converged now 
into a brick laid walk which curved about through 
the shrubbery and led, not to the porticoed main 
entrance, but to a smaller doorway at the head of 
a flight of brick steps. The steps led also to a 
brick paved pergola, evidently meant in the sum- 
mer time to have a gay striped awning stretched 
over it. Just now, it was basking warmly in the 
March sun. 

“ I went up to the door and rapped lightly with 
a genuine old colonial knocker which I found there 
instead of a bell. I hadn’t planned what I should 
say to the person who opened the door, because it 
seemed better, somehow, to trust to the inspiration 
of the moment. So much would depend on what 
sort of person the caretaker happened to be. 

‘‘ It was lucky I hadn’t any very fixed idea — no 
little explanatory speech committed to memory. 
If I had such a thing on the tip of my tongue, I’d 
have been a good deal worse disconcerted than I 
was. The knocker was pulled out of my hand by 
the door being briskly opened by someone whose 
hand must have been on the knob when I started 
to knock — someone in the act of coming out. 

“ There in the passage, very erect and self-pos- 
sessed, blinking a little in the sudden flood of sun- 
shine that came in when the door opened, stood — 
whom do you suppose, Drew? — the last person I 
expected to find there — Miss Meredith herself. 

172 


BEECH HILL 


She’s one of the most wonderful looking old ladies 
I ever saw in my life; beautiful, what we 
mean when we say regal, vigorous, wonderfully 
vitalized. 

“ She didn’t start at all at the sight of me. Just 
looked at me a minute in a perfectly composed sort 
of way and asked what I wanted. At the sound 
of her voice, I heard someone moving behind her 
in the passage and made out over her shoulder, 
someone whom I took to be a maid or sort of com- 
panion, loaded down with rugs and cushions. 

“ ‘ My name’s Jeffrey,’ I said, for it was some- 
how out of the question to try any pretense with a 
person like that, though I didn’t know what sort of 
reception my name would get. 

“ But her face lighted up at it, as if she were 
genuinely pleased, and she held out her hand to me. 
‘ At last ! ’ she said. ‘ I was beginning to think 
you were a myth.’ She nodded toward a couple of 
big chairs in the pergola and added: ‘I was just 
going out for a doze in the warm sun. But a chat 
with you will be much better.’ 

“ Then she turned back and spoke to the woman 
in the passage. ‘ Will you please bring an extra 
rug. Miss Martin.’ 

“ This momentary delay gave me my story. ‘ I 
wrote to Dr. Crow,’ said I, ‘ asking for permission 
to see you, and he told me you’d receive me to-day.’ 

“ I thought I saw just a flicker of surprise go 

173 


THE GHOST GIRL 


over her face at that, but it didn’t show much more 
than she meant it to, and all she said was : 

“ ‘ Doctor Crow is a very competent young man.’ 

“ The woman she called Miss Martin came up 
just then and began bundling her up in rugs and 
packing in cushions about her. But though she was 
busily occupied with Miss Meredith all the time, I 
couldn’t help feeling that she was regarding me 
with a certain uneasiness and mistrust. Miss 
Meredith insisted on my having one of the rugs 
and then sent Miss Martin into the house, telling 
her she shouldn’t need her for an hour. I thought 
the woman went away reluctantly. 

“ Well, we chatted for a few minutes about the 
beauty of the day and the pleasure of getting out 
into the country for the early spring and I admitted 
that I had got myself pretty well mired up, tres- 
passing in her woods. She seemed to take that 
absolutely as a matter-of-course and didn’t show 
the slightest curiosity about where I had been, 
though I said I had been looking at the river from 
the boat landing. Then all at once she reverted 
to what she had said before, about beginning to 
think that I was a myth. 

“ Drew, she had thought all along, that my not 
seeing her had been my own doing. She’d wanted 
to see me, she said, but Crow had made me out a 
sort of hermit who didn’t see anybody if he could 
help it. How he reconciled a statement like that 

174 


BEECH HILL 

with the fact that I am a portrait painter, I don’t 
know. 

“ She was perfectly frank in her curiosity about 
me, as an autocratic old lady like that is likely to be, 
and kept me talking about myself for a solid hour; 
asked innumerable questions about How I paint, 
where I live, about my life abroad, and so on. 

“ At the end of the hour, Miss Martin appeared 
again. Miss Meredith got up a little reluctantly. 
‘You’ll stay to lunch, won’t you?’ she said. ‘I 
haven’t had as pleasant a morning in a long time. 
I hope you’re not in a hurry to get back to New 
York.’ 

“ Of course I said I’d stay with the greatest 
pleasure. She gave me an informal nod and started 
toward the door. ‘ Miss Martin will take charge 
of you till lunch time,’ she said. ‘ I daresay you 
will want to freshen up a bit after your tramp 
through the woods. We’ll lunch at one.’ And 
with that, she walked into the house. 

“ I waited a minute for Miss Martin to follow 
her and lead the way for me. But instead of that, 
she stood right where she was, apparently making 
up her mind to say something. It was then I took 
my first good look at her. She was a tall, rather 
lean young woman, unmistakably well-bred, with a 
severe profile and a rather tight way of doing her 
hair. 

“ She stood there confronting me, a little embar- 

175 


THE GHOST GIRL 


rassed, but perfectly resolute. I had unconsciously 
moved a little toward the door and was standing 
beside one of the pillars. She stepped into the 
doorway and stood confronting me. 

“ ‘ I am very sorry/ she said, ‘ to be obliged to 
countermand Miss Meredith’s invitation.’ 

“ ‘ Countermand it! ’ said I. 

“ ‘ I am Miss Meredith’s nurse,’ she said. ‘ I 
am under the doctor’s explicit instructions. I 
haven’t any discretion at all in the matter. I must 
ask you to go away, Mr. Jeffrey, at once.’ 

“‘Those are Doctor Crow’s instructions?’ I 
asked. 

“ She didn’t answer that question at all. Just 
stood there looking at me and said again : ‘ At 

once.’ 

“ Her manner, as well as her words, made it per- 
fectly clear that I shouldn’t get into that door, ex- 
cept by brute force. The thing was so utterly un- 
expected, and in the light of the deception Crow 
had practiced toward me with Miss Meredith, so 
sinister, that I was very loath to accept the situation. 

“ Just at that second, as I was preparing to turn 
away, I started again and all but duplicated my 
yell in the stateroom the night before, because 
something soft and alive dropped from the pillar 
over my head upon my shoulder. I clutched at it 
and found I had in my hand — what do you sup- 
pose, Drew? — the same fluffy little baby raccoon 
176 


BEECH HILL 


that had tried to pull my eyelid up the night before. 

“ The nurse smiled a pleasant sort of smile and 
rescued the thing from my hand. ‘ I’m sorry,’ she 
said. ‘ That’s Miss Meredith’s newest pet. He’s 
quite harmless, but I’m afraid rather disconcerting. 
That’s his second adventure within the last twenty- 
four hours.’ ” 


CHAPTER XIV 

DOCTOR CROW FORGETS 


J EFFREY stopped there and for a while we just 
sat looking at each other. The links con- 
nected, it seemed to me, into a perfect chain of un- 
escapable inferences. Crow, on receiving Jeffrey’s 
note, in order to make sure of avoiding even a 
chance meeting between him and Miss Meredith, 
had sent her off to Beech Hill. The escapades of 
the baby raccoon made it plain that the occupants 
of the stateroom next to Jeffrey’s were Miss Mere- 
dith and her companion. It was from that state- 
room that the insane laughter which horrified Jeff- 
rey had issued, and the words : “ She’s dead. I 

killed her.” The nurse’s action in countermanding 
her mistress’s invitation to lunch made it evident 
enough who the maniac was that had made that 
confession. And then there was the skiff, the un- 
locked boathouse, the long painter cut where the 
forward end of it had been tied round a thwart. 

Oh, it wasn’t evidence. Richards would laugh 
at it. But see how well it fitted in. Then I re- 
called the gossip about the Meredith family that 
Jeffrey had extracted from the driver who took him 
out to Beech Hill — the brilliant, highly bred, will- 
ful Merediths, with the streak almost of insanity, 
178 


DOCTOR CROW FORGETS 

that cropped up here and there; of Claire’s artist 
father and her peasant mother; of the strange life 
the girl must have led, of the girl’s disappearance 
over there in Paris and Miss Meredith’s return with 
the announcement that she was dead. 

How had the streak cropped up in Claire her- 
self? What, if Jeffrey’s theory were right, was the 
cause of the bitter enmity that accounted for her 
appearance in New York under another name and 
of the tragedy that led to the finding of the body 
in the river and the maniacal confession Jeffrey 
overheard through the thin partition between the 
two staterooms? But the whole succession of inci- 
dents wove themselves into a pattern that was plain 
enough to read, and grim enough, I thought. 

I glanced around at Jeffrey who stood at the 
window looking out at the fading, electric-lighted, 
city twilight, and the uncanny — almost — fear of 
him that so often came over me, came back again. 
How had he managed, amid the maze of mislead- 
ing circumstances, to disentangle the true threads 
of the mystery? 

“ Well,” said I, catching at Richard’s phrase, 
“ I don’t see how you do it, but there’s no doubt 
you’ve done it again.” 

Jeffrey wheeled around. “ Done what? ” he 
asked. 

“ Solved the mystery of the girl in the ice.” 

Jeffrey shook his head soberly. “ That’s just 
179 


THE GHOST GIRL 


what I haven’t done,” said he. “ I never was more 
puzzled in my life.” 

“ Not all the details, I’ll admit,” said I, “ but 
the main facts of it, certainly. What was Richards’s 
phrase? — You’ve ‘ got a confession and a motive ’ 
— that is, if you call a maniacal impulse a motive. 
And you’ve got a mass of corroborating circum- 
stances.” 

“ So had Richards,” said Jeffrey. “ And yet I 
haven’t got the real answer any more than he had. 
I told you the truth just now, when I said I never 
was more puzzled in my life.” 

“ Well, I may be stupid,” said I, “ but it looks 
pretty complete to me.” 

“ ‘ Pretty complete,’ ” echoed Jeffrey grimly. 
“ That’s the secret of all Richards’s mistakes. His 
cases are all ‘ pretty complete.’ But, Drew, no case 
is complete so long as it contains one single circum- 
stance that contradicts the rest. It isn’t complete 
until everything fits — everything.” 

“ Well,” said I, “ what is there here that doesn’t 
fit?” 

“ Do you remember what the insane voice said 
in the stateroom? ‘ I killed her with a pin.’ 
What did she mean by that? The girl in the ice 
had been shot.” 

‘‘ Raving,” said I. “ You can’t expect a maniac 
to be logical.” 

“ And then,” he went on, “ who put the boat in 
i8o 


DOCTOR CROW FORGETS 


the river? Who unlocked the boathouse and 
launched the boat and towed the body out into the 
current? ” 

“ Insane people are pretty strong sometimes,” 
said I. “ Miss Meredith might have done it.” 

“Oh, she’s strong enough to do it to-day,” said 
Jeffrey. “ But that wasn’t a maniacal act.” 

“ Maniacs are cunning, too,” said I. 

“ It wasn’t a cunning act,” retorted Jeffrey. 
“ An insane person would be too clever, once he 
started out to dispose of the body, to make such a 
bad job of it. If the body was to be put into the 
water, why wasn’t it weighted so it would sink? 
Why wasn’t the boat returned to its proper place 
in the boathouse and the painter cut away? The 
person who disposed of that body, was acting under 
the logical terror of the consequences of his act — 
a thing a maniac isn’t hampered by. And then, 
there’s Doctor Crow. How do his actions fit into 
the story? No, there’s something more there — 
something I haven’t even got a glimpse of yet.” 

It had grown late. It was long after anybody’s 
office hours, and the big building where I had my 
oflice was strangely still, as such buildings are at 
night. 

In the silence that fell between us, we heard the 
clash of the door to the single occasional elevator 
that served the whole building during the evening 
hours — heard, through the open transom, the soft 

i8i 


THE GHOST GIRL 


purr of its rise and then the clash of another door 
as it stopped at our floor to let someone out. Then 
there came the hollow ring of footsteps down the 
corridor and, to my surprise, a knock at my outer 
door. 

“ I don’t know who that can be,” said I. 

The listlessness of a moment before had disap- 
peared from Jeffrey’s attitude. He stood erect and 
tense. His eyes were bright and his lips curved 
into a hard smile. 

“ Let him in,” he said softly. 

My office boy had gone long ago, springing the 
catch of the outer door behind him, so that it was 
there that I went to admit my visitor. He was the 
man we had just been talking about. 

” Oh, Doctor Crow,” said I. “ Won’t you come 
in?” 

He stepped into the outer office. I tried to get 
you at your house,” he said, “ and they told me I 
might find you here. I’m sorry to call at such an 
hour, but it’s important.” 

His face and his manner were grave and rather 
oppressive. The only fault I had found with him 
on the occasion of our other interview had been his 
smile which he turned on rather too often and sud- 
denly. There was no trace of that smile now. 

“ I had a note yesterday from Mr. Jeffrey,” he 
went on, “ stating that he had sent us the portrait 
of Miss Claire Meredith and asking for an appoint- 
182 


DOCTOR CROW FORGETS 


ment with Miss Meredith herself. I made that ap- 
pointment and waited in all the afternoon. But 
Mr. Jeffrey didn’t keep it. His note was urgent 
and I hoped that possibly you might give me some 
information about him.” 

“ My impression is,” said I, “ that Mr. Jeffrey 
did keep the appointment. But he’s here in my 
office at this moment. Won’t you come in and talk 
with him? ” 

His face was perfectly expressionless for a full 
five seconds. He didn’t move in the direction of 
the inner door I indicated. But, at the end of that 
time, he said in a rather level voice, “ I’m glad he’s 
here. I’d like to talk with him very much.” 

Jeffrey turned away from the window as we came 
into the room. His manner, to a casual stranger, 
would have seemed languid, almost indifferent. 
But my close knowledge of him gave me one or two 
signs that betrayed the real truth — the slightly nar- 
rowed, almost rigid eyelids and the hardly percep- 
tible quiver of his sensitive nostrils. 

“ Doctor Crow was under the impression,” said 
I, when they had greeted each other, “ that you 
hadn’t kept your appointment with Miss Meredith 
to-day. I told him I thought you had.” 

“ Oh, yes,” said Jeffrey in a matter-of-fact tone, 
“ I went up on the night boat to be there bright and 
early. I had a very pleasant visit with her this 
morning.” 

183 


THE GHOST GIRL 


“ It was for Miss Meredith’s town house that I 
made the appointment,” said Crow. “ It never oc- 
curred to me that you would go to Beech Hill.” 

“ I don’t think either of us mentioned her town 
house in our exchange of notes,” said Jeffrey. “ I 
went to Beech Hill as a matter of course. But I 
take it from your explanation that you didn’t intend 
me to see Miss Meredith, after all.” 

Crow shook his head. “ The misapprehension 
has rather forced my hand,” he said with a sort of 
rueful frankness. “ I am obliged to confess that 
I didn’t Intend you to see her. Miss Meredith had 
been in town, but the state of her health forced me 
to send her to Beech Hill. I Intended to keep the 
appointment you had made, for her and explain 
matters to you.” 

“ Perhaps,” said Jeffrey sllklly, “ you will ex- 
plain them now. But I’ll say in the meantime, for 
your reassurance, that I had the pleasantest sort of 
visit with Miss Meredith and my impression is that 
she enjoyed It as much as I did. I can’t believe 
that her having seen me will have any deleterious 
results.” 

We were all seated by that time and Jeffrey 
passed around his cigarettes. There was a rather 
long silence before Crow began to talk. But even 
before he had said a word, his manner made, on 
me at least, a strong impression In his favor. 
There was no pretense about him. He seemed like 
184 


DOCTOR CROW FORGETS 


^^nan approaching a difficult subject with the seri- 
/ Cs, candid intention of getting to the bottom of it. 

“ The ethics of a doctor’s profession,” he began 
at last, “ are often very puzzling. We are under 
oath to do certain things and to refrain from doing 
certain other things. And the fact that that oath 
has been binding for a good many centuries is proof 
enough of its validity. And yet I am going to 
break it now in one of its important particulars. I 
am forbidden to talk about a patient, I am sworn to 
treat a patient’s confidential communications, volun- 
tary or otherwise, as sacred. I cannot /be com- 
pelled to testify in a court of law any more than a 
priest can be compelled to violate the secrets of the 
confessional. And yet this case is so exceptional 
that I really feel compelled to do it. 

“ I am sure,” he went on, after another moment 
of silence, “ that I needn’t say anything more than 
this to insure your treating what I have to tell you 
as sacredly confidential.” 

“ Certainly,” said I. 

Jeffrey nodded. 

“ I want to begin by saying that as a small boy, 
on my occasional visits to Beech Hill, I was always 
rather a favorite of Miss Meredith’s. She liked 
me much better than her brother did. For no bet- 
ter reason, I believe,” he smiled in a sober sort of 
way, “ than because I was a harum-scarum sort of 
youngster — a sort of black lamb, if you like. She 
13 185 


THE GHOST GIRL 

quarreled with my parents, however, as she did 
with pretty nearly everybody in those days, anc^-I 
was genuinely surprised, three years ago, when she 
returned from Paris after Claire’s death, that she 
should have sent for me to come to make her a 
visit at Beech Hill. 

“ We spent a week-end together, there being no 
other visitor, and on my preparing to go back to 
town, she proposed that I give up my practice such 
as it was, and come and live with her. She said . 
frankly that she had in mind making me her heir; 
she had tried me out and she believed we should J 
get on together. She wanted someone, she said, : 
to stand between her and the world and she’d rather | 
have me than a paid secretary. 

“ She offered me a good deal more independence ^ 
than that sort of position usually carries — a whole | 
wing of the house to myself and all the time I I 
wanted for my laboratory work. I 

“ I think I have told you both that she was, at I 
that time, far from well, and that she needed some- } 
one with a medical training to look after her. ) 
That statement was true, but it was very far within 'i 
the truth. The fact was that she was not only t 
nervously upset, suffering from the shock of Claire’s | 
death, but that her mind was, permanently or tern- | 
porarily, I couldn’t tell which, deranged. i 

“ I think you will see the difficulty of my posi- 
tion. The greater part of the time she was as sane ^ 

i86 


DOCTOR CROW FORGETS 

as you or I. One course that was open to me was 
to take her before a commissioner in lunacy, have 
her declared insane and have a conservator ap- 
pointed for her estate. Such a course would cer- 
tainly have cleared my skirts of any charge of self- 
interest or unprofessional conduct and it would ben- 
efit a number of distant collateral heirs, all of whom 
hated her, none of whom would live with her, all 
of whom werev merely waiting for her death, to 
get what they regarded as their share of her 
property. On the other hand, the ordeal of facing 
the commission and of being adjudged insane, to a 
person who was sane enough nine-tenths of the time 
to fully appreciate the horror of it, would undoubt- 
edly be worse for her, would tend to perpetuate the 
insanity which I hoped to cure. 

“ The course I decided upon was, I frankly ad- 
mit, in accordance with my own selfish interests. 
But I believed honestly and sincerely that it ac- 
corded with her best interests too.” 

“ I have no difficulty believing that,” said I, “ and 
I do really appreciate the difficulties of your situa- 
tion.” 

He laughed grimly. “ Not yet you don’t,” he 
said. “ I thought they were difficult enough at the 
beginning, but that was nothing to what happened 
within the first week of my attendance upon her.” 

He paused there and drew a long, rather un- 
steady breath. “ I’ll try not to harrow you with 

187 


THE GHOST GIRL 

details,” he said. “ But what happened was that 
Miss Meredith had a violent maniacal outbreak, 
during which she said positively that she had killed 
her niece.” 

I didn’t dare look at Jeffrey. I felt, rather than 
saw, the sudden relaxation of his body in the chair, 
that told me, who knew him so well, the intensity 
with which his mind had been waiting for Crow’s 
next words. 

“ I tried as best I could to get details. But all I 
could get, beyond the bare assertion ‘ I killed her. 
I know she is dead. I killed her myself ! ’ was the 
apparently senseless statement — ‘ I killed her with 
a pin.’ ” 

“ I confess I didn’t know what to do. I had 
never gone back of her own unsupported statement 
that Claire had died of small-pox and I was still 
inclined to think it likely that that was true. But 
of course I couldn’t let it go at that. I communi- 
cated with friends in Paris and asked them to get 
the official version of Claire Meredith’s death. 
When Miss Meredith herself had recovered from 
the attack and was superficially sane again, I made 
an effort to bring up the subject and get some de- 
tails from her. But it was evident that that 
wouldn’t do. For some reason or other, Claire’s 
death was so intimately associated with the source 
of her delusions that any approach to the subject 
seemed to bring them back. 

i88 


DOCTOR CROW FORGETS 


“ But, after what seemed an interminable while, 
I got word from Paris. The girl had died during 
a serious epidemic of the disease, having been 
taken, as soon as it was diagnosed in her case, out 
of Miss Meredith’s care altogether and conveyed to 
the pesthouse. There wasn’t the faintest irregu- 
larity about it, nor, so far as I could see, any oppor- 
tunity for any irregularity. My friends had a copy 
of the death certificate made and sent to me. 

“ That was a great relief, of course, but it left 
me still in the dark as to what I was most anxious 
to get at; namely, the source of Miss Meredith’s 
delusion. She rarely mentioned Claire. Though, 
from occasional remarks she dropped, I gathered 
that they had not got on well together and that the 
antipathy between them had grown with the years. 
Miss Meredith’s attitude toward her loss has always 
struck me as being one of remorse rather than of 
regret; as if, in her sanest moments, she still felt 
herself responsible for Claire’s death. For some 
reason or other, that was the thing that was prey- 
ing on her mind and I felt that I must discover the 
source of the delusion in order to remove it. 

“ It was by the merest chance in the world that 
I did discover it. I was turning over the contents 
of her strong box one day, in a search for some 
papers she had directed me to find, when I came 
upon a photograph of Claire — a print from the 
same plate, evidently,” he turned to Jeffrey, “ as 
189 


THE GHOST GIRL 


the one you used for the portrait. That picture 
gave me the clue. It was marked, spotted all over, 
with pin-pricks.” 

I heard a little catch in Jeffrey’s slow, even 
breathing, and he sat up with a sudden look of 
illumination. 

“ That’s very interesting,” he said. It was his 
first remark since Crow had begun his story. “ It 
must have seemed strange to come upon an evidence 
of Salem witchcraft here in the beginning of the 
twentieth century.” 

“ You’re rather wonderful,” said Crow, “ to get 
it all in a minute like that. It took me three solid 
days to figure it out, and I had heard of one or two 
other modern cases that might have given me a 
precedent.” 

“ You will have to explain it to me,” said I. 

“ Why, she must have gone on hating her niece 
for years, in her cold, repressed Meredith way. I 
know that during the time they lived in Paris, she 
was amusing herself with new religions — some of 
the psuedo mysticism that is cropping up everywhere 
in Europe and America and is making life such a 
cinch for a lot of these fake East Indian Brahmins. 
The eccentric streak that is so characteristic in her 
family, happened to take that form. 

“ She had a photograph taken of her niece and 
began making pin-pricks in it, with the idea of exer- 
cising a malign influence on the girl — possibly even 


DOCTOR CROW FORGETS 

with the idea that the effect of it would be fatal. 
The idea was horrifying to me, until I came to the 
conclusion that the act itself had been a part of her 
delusion. Or, perhaps she did it in a wholly ex- 
perimental and incredulous way, without any serious 
belief that it could do her niece any harm. But 
you will understand in a moment, how the coinci- 
dence of the malady that did overtake Claire must 
have affected her. The marks of small-pox must 
have seemed perfectly definite correspondents to the 
pin-pricks in the photograph. The fact that the 
doctors called it small-pox, even the fact that there 
was an epidemic of it in the city at the time, didn’t 
at all relieve her own interior conviction that she, 
and no one else, was responsible for Claire’s death. 

“ The moment I discovered where the seat of the 
delusion was, I set to work removing it. I brought 
Miss Meredith into town, took her about with me 
wherever I thought It was safe ; In a word, did every- 
thing I could to divert her mind. Meanwhile I had 
sent to the photographer in Paris who had made 
the photograph and asked him for another print. 
When It came back, I took it to Beech Hill and sub- 
stituted it for the pin-pricked one in Miss Mere- 
dith’s box. I began talking about Claire and finally 
succeeded In getting Miss Meredith to talk about 
her in a more or less normal way. Finally I said I 
thought It would be an excellent plan to have Claire’s 
portrait painted. I remarked that I had come upon 


THE GHOST GIRL 


an excellent photograph of her In Miss Meredith’s 
box and that I thought a skillful portrait painter like 
yourself,” he nodded toward Jeffrey, “ would be able 
to produce a satisfactory, as well as a beautiful por- 
trait from it. 

“ Of course the idea that I had found out what 
she regarded as her fatal secret, excited my patient 
exceedingly. I had taken her to Beech Hill for the 
purpose of making the suggestion, and against her 
vigorous protest, I went to the box, got out the pho- 
tograph and showed it to her. Of course she was 
greatly excited to find it was not defaced. But the 
result of the experiment was as I had anticipated. 
She knew she had been ill, had been suffering from 
delusions, and she simply placed this among them 
and dismissed it as nothing worse than a long night- 
mare. She seemed to me to be on the road to a 
complete recovery. 

“ And then something happened I couldn’t possibly 
have foreseen — something that has gone far to 
undo all that I tried to accomplish in the way of 
effecting a cure. By some means or other which I 
never have fathomed, a pair of spiritualists learned 
or guessed that Miss Meredith might be made their 
prey. They got into communication with her — a 
thing that Miss Meredith’s greatly improved health 
made it much easier for them to do than it would 
have been three months before — and persuaded her 
to come to a seance. They got hold of some woman, 
192 


DOCTOR CROW FORGETS 


I don’t know where, who bore a rather surprising 
likeness to Miss Meredith’s dead niece. They even 
succeeded in tricking her out in a gown similar to the 
one Claire had worn when she had her photograph 
taken and they showed Miss Meredith a materializa- 
tion vivid and lifelike enough to upset the mind that 
had so recently regained its balance. 

“ There were circumstances which made it irn^ 
possible for me to appeal to the police, so I did the 
only thing that seemed left for me to do. I found 
out the woman who had impersonated Claire at the 
seance and bribed her with a good round sum to dis- 
appear. And since then I have made some progress 
toward effecting a second cure.” 

“ You were lucky to ge rid of the impostor as 
easily as that,” said Jeffrey. “ Those people gen- 
erally stick like leeches. They go away with one 
bribe only to come back for another.” 

“ I’ve an idea that Fate took a hand in that game,” 
said Doctor Crow soberly. “ I believe the young 
woman met with foul play. Certainly the pictures 
the papers published of the girl who was found in 
the ice a few months ago, bore a striking resem- 
blance to her. I’d have been glad to give the police 
a hint that would lead towards her identification, if 
the circumstances had not made it impossible. But 
I think you will see that my hands were tied in that 
matter pretty completely.” 

“ Yes,” said Jeffrey, “ I can see that.” 

193 


THE GHOST GIRL 


Crow rose from his chair. “I hope you can see, 
too,” he said, “ the reason why my dealings with you 
have not been as frank and direct as I could wish 
them to be. I honestly meant, when I made that ap- 
pointment with you for this afternoon, to tell you 
something of these circumstances, though not so much 
as I have told you this evening. On the whole, I 
am not sorry that you forced my hand. I have had 
to make a great many difficult decisions within the 
last three years without consulting anybody, and I 
have had to carry around more secrets inside of my 
head than any man could find pleasant. It has been 
a great relief to take you into my confidence.” 

Jeffrey rose, too. “ Well,” he said, “ if anything 
more turns up, come to us again. If there is any- 
thing we can do, call on us. My friend Drew, here, 
has more common sense than any man I know. And 
I, myself, come across with a lucky guess occasion- 
ally. It has been a very interesting story and we are 
both greatly indebted to you for telling it to us. We 
have a problem of our own on hand which it may 
help us to solve.” 

Crow nodded and said good-night to Jeffrey. I 
was already in the doorway, in the act of showing 
him out. 

“ By the way,” said Jeffrey, and Crow stopped 
short. Perhaps he had said it a little too casually, 
for I myself had the feeling something was coming. 
“ There’s that photograph you gave me to paint 

194 


DOCTOR CROW FORGETS 

from. I must return that. Fd forgotten it. Shall 
I send it to Beech Hill or to Miss Meredith’s town 
address? ” 

“ Why, you may as well send it direct to Beech 
Hill,” said Crow. 

“ I’ll attend to it at once,” said Jeffrey, “ and then 
I sha’n’t have anything more on my mind. There is 
nothing else, is there?” 

“ I think not,” said Crow, “ and you can congratu- 
late yourself on a very successful outcome. The 
portrait was really wonderful. Good-night again.” 

He looked, as he stood there facing Jeffrey, hold- 
ing out his hand to him, like a man who had just got 
rid of some long crushing oppression, who had just 
dropped a load off his shoulders and was standing 
up straight and drawing deep, comfortable breaths 
for the first time in a long while. 

I didn’t wonder at that. I could see that his 
secret knowledge of Miss Meredith’s condition, his 
uncertainty, the puzzling coincidence of his own self- 
ish interests with those of his patient, must have 
driven him nearly distracted. 

So it was with real cordiality, when he had fol- 
lowed me to the outer door, which I held open for 
him, that I extended my hand to him. He didn’t 
seem to see my hand — didn’t move his own to meet 
it, and at that I looked into his face. It had 
changed somehow in the last five seconds. There 
was a look almost of panic in his eyes. He made 
195 


THE GHOST GIRL 


an Imperceptible move as if to brush by me and go 
back into the inner office. But he checked it. 
Then, with what seemed a supreme effort, he re- 
covered his former manner, shook hands hastily 
and walked swiftly away down the corridor to the 
elevator. 

I found Jeffrey pacing up and down, his eyes 
shining with excitement. 

“ WeVe got the right trail at last. Drew,” he said 
excitedly. “ We’ve got it at last.” 

He took another turn across the room, tugging 
with both hands at his hair, as he was wont to do 
in moments of excitement. Then he stopped and 
stood facing me. 

“ Are you game. Drew? Will you see it through 
with me? ” 

“See what through?” said I. “It’s all ex- 
plained now. Isn’t It? What Is there for us to 
do?” 

“ We’ve got to outguess him,” said Jeffrey 
thoughtfully. “ Will he bring her back to town, or 
will he leave her at Beech Hill? He meant to 
bring her back to town, but will he do It now? 
Perhaps he’s brought her already — sent for her 
as soon as they wired him I had been there.” 

“What In the world are you talking about?” I 
demanded. 

He paid no attention to my question, but started 
walking up and down again. 

196 


DOCTOR CROW FORGETS 


“ He’ll see it,” said Jeffrey. “ He’s sure to see 
it. He may catch on any minute.” 

I remembered the sudden change that had come 
over Crow’s face just before he left me. 

“ I don’t in the least know what you mean,” said 
I, “ but, Jeffrey, I believe he has seen it.” 

He wheeled and faced me, his eyes eager with 
the question he did not need to ask. 

“ Just before he left me, there in the outer office, 
his face changed and a queer look came into it. I 
thought for a moment he was coming back into this 
room. It was as if he’d forgotten something — 
something important. And then he changed his 
mind and went away.” 

“ He sees, then,” said Jeffrey. “ Well, I’m not 
sorry. On the whole. I’d rather play the hand that 
way.” 

“ But what do you mean? ” I cried. 

“ He had forgotten something,” said Jeffrey 
soberly. “ Oh, there’s no time to talk now. 
We’ve got to move quick. We’ve got to go to 
Beech Hill to-night. We’re going to commit a 
burglary. Drew. Are you game?” 


CHAPTER XV 

A NIGHT RIDE 


LL he waited for was my somewhat dubious 



n nod of assent. Already he was in my desk 
chair, and by unhooking the telephone receiver he 
cut short the flood of questions I’d have over- 
whelmed him with, if he’d given me the chance. 

“There’s a taxi-stand on the corner, isn’t there? 
That’ll be quicker than ’phoning for one. Do you 
mind getting it? ” 

I answered by catching up my coat and hat. 
“ While you’re at the ’phone, though,” said I, “ do 
you mind calling my house and telling Jack or 
Gwendolen that I shan’t be home to-night. Luckily 
Madeline’s away.” 

“ That’s a good notion. Drew.” He spoke as 
though it were a particularly shrewd Idea, and not 
in the least satirically either. Evidently it had 
suggested something to him so Instantaneously that 
he thought the suggestion Itself had come from me. 
He often did that. I wondered what the idea was, 
but he waved me away, so I rushed out after the 
taxi and left him to arrange matters his own way. 

When I came back with the cab, I found him 
waiting at the curb. That surprised me, because I 
had got the idea that secrecy was to be part of the 


198 


A NIGHT RIDE 


program. If anyone were on the watch, it would 
be easy enough to see us starting off together, at any 
rate. Just as Jeffrey took his seat beside me, 
another taxi came up behind, rather slowly, as if 
waiting to see what we wanted of the road before it 
tried to pass. 

Jeffrey glanced back at it and then called an ad- 
dress to our own chauffeur. The address was that 
of my own house uptown! 

In a moment I thought I had the idea. The taxi 
behind meant to follow us and Jeffrey had called 
out that address to throw them off the trail. 

Our chauffeur, with a warning gesture to the car 
behind, pulled out into the road and turned around, 
the other taxi checking up at the curb to give us 
room. The occupant of it was an insignificant 
looking young man who gave you the impression of 
flashiness and shabbiness all at the same time. He 
didn’t look at us at all, seemed to be looking along 
for a street number. His taxi was still jogging 
along close to the curb when we turned the corner. 

“ We needn’t have taken so much trouble to mis- 
lead him after all,” said I. “ I thought for an in- 
stant he was a detective, and so, evidently, did you. 
What address do you want to go to? ” 

“ That’s the right address for your house, isn’t 
it?” 

“What are we going to my house for?” I de- 
manded. 


199 


THE GHOST GIRL 


“Why,” said Jeffrey, “I thought that was your 
own idea? But it doesn’t matter which of us 
thought of it,” he went on as I started to protest 
“ It’s the right place for us to go.” 

At that the light went out of his eyes and he 
leaned back limply against the cushions, so com- 
pletely absorbed in the train of thought that was 
occupying him, that I hadn’t the heart for any more 
questions. 

The taxi was chugging along, not so very fast, 
and I, with the need for haste that Jeffrey had im- 
pressed upon me, strongly in mind, reached for the 
speaking tube and was about to tell the chauffeur 
to speed up a little, when Jeffrey took it away from 
me and shook his head. ^ 

“ No hurry,” he said. “ He’s going fast 
enough.” 

So by the time we had pulled up at my own door, 
I was pretty completely mystified. 

There was another car standing there, and when 
we got near enough, I recognized it as Jack’s big 
limousine. Evidently he and Gwendolen were 
going out somewhere, for the door opened just as 
our car stopped and they came down the steps. 

“ Shall we want the taxi again, Jeffrey? ” I asked. 

“ No,” he said. “ We’re through with him.” 

So I turned to pay the driver. Jeffrey lounged 
out of the cab and at sight of him, Gwendolen and 
Jack both exclaimed their pleasure at the meeting. 

200 


A NIGHT RIDE 


I got my change from the driver of the tax» 
and then, just as I was turning away to join the 
group, I saw another taxi round the corner. It 
might have been fancy, but I thought I recognized 
it for the same car that had come up behind us just 
as we were leaving my office. We had been fol- 
lowed then, after all. The car was jogging along 
in no greater hurry than we seemed to be in our- 
selves. 

“ What are you people going to do with your- 
selves?” asked Gwendolen as we came up. 

“Why, I don’t know,” said Jeffrey. “We’ve 
nothing in particular to do? Why?” 

“ Then come along and dine with us,” said Jack. 
“ We’re going down to dine at one of the restau- 
rants.” 

“You people are dressed,” said Jeffrey, “and 
we aren’t.” 

“Oh,” said Gwendolen, “what does that mat- 
ter? We’ll go where you won’t mind — the La- 
fayette or somewhere.” 

All the while the other taxi had been drawing 
closer. Just as it came opposite us, Jeffrey said: 

“We’ll have to run away afterwards. We’ve 
an engagement for the end of the evening.” 

“ Let’s waste no time beginning it, then,” said 
Jack and he caught Jeffrey by the arm and began 
pushing him toward the car. 

“ All right,” said Jeffrey. 

201 


14 


THE GHOST GIRL 


I followed without a word* The other taxi had 
gone by, still rather slowly. 

Our car started off with a jump the minute the 
door was shut behind me. Evidently the chauf- 
feur had been told what to do. At the corner we 
turned to the right, which was natural enough. If 
one wanted to follow the Avenue downtown. But 
at the first corner, we whipped around to the right 
again and In a minute were flying along, on the 
high speed, northward. 

“ We timed that pretty well, I think,’* said Gwen- 
dolen. “ I never dressed so fast In my life and I’m 
sure the hooks up my back are just caught Into any- 
thing. But It certainly went as smoothly as If It had 
been rehearsed. I was so afraid I wouldn’t be able 
to say Lafayette at the right time. But he did 
hear. I’m sure.” She turned and peered out of 
the little back window. “ And he isn’t following.” 

‘‘ Oh, it worked,” said Jeffrey, “ like a charm. 
Even when we don’t turn up at the Lafayette, he 
won’t know that we haven’t changed our minds and 
gone to some other restaurant.” 

“ An awfully clever Idea,” said Gwendolen. 

“ Drew thought of It,” said Jeffrey. 

“ All I thought of,” said I, “ was to ask Jeffrey 
to telephone you that I shouldn’t be home to-night. 
Whenever I’ve tried to ask him any questions since, 
about what all these maneuvers meant, he’s told 
me it was my own Idea. But I’ve only just got it 
202 


A NIGHT RIDE 


through my head what it’s all about. Did Jeffrey 
also tell you,” I concluded, “ where we were going 
and what we are going to do and did he tell you 
that this was my idea, too? ” 

“ He only told us,” said Gwendolen, “ that you 
were going to burgle Beech Hill.” 

I don’t believe any professional ever spoke of 
cracking a crib more casually than Gwendolen did. 

“ I think I’ve got everything you need in here,” 
she said, “ — everything you spoke of, and I have 
put in an extra suit of clothes of Cliff’s and one of 
Jack’s for you. It ought to fit pretty well, I think. 
And then, if anything happens, if your looks get 
damaged or anything, the fresh clothes will be much 
more respectable.” 

“ Bully for you,” Jeffrey said. “ You know, you 
people are a pair of trumps to turn in and help us 
out this way. We’re making criminals of you, too. 
‘ Accessories before the fact ’ — That’s the term, 
isn’t it. Drew? ” 

“ We’re going to be ever so much more ‘ acces- 
sory ’ than you think,” said Gwendolen. “ We’re 
going all the way to Oldborough. — Oh, Jack says 
it’s all right,” she went on in answer to my move- 
ment of protest. “ What’s the sense of our getting 
off at the ferry and going back when we can just as 
well go all the way and see the fun ? ” 

“ I doubt if it turns out to be precisely a picnic,” 
said Jeffrey seriously. “ I don’t see exactly how 
203 


THE GHOST GIRL 


weVe going to work the trick ourselves. And as 
for taking a gallery along to cheer . . 

“Gallery, indeed!” said Gwendolen indignantly. 
“ I don’t believe you have figured it out. What 
are you going to do with the car while you’re 
burgling? You can’t go chugging right up the 
driveway in it. If you leave it beside the road 
somewhere, it will attract as much attention as an 
elephant. If you send it to the garage at Oldbor- 
ough just with James, that’ll look queer, and if you 
appear yourselves and don’t go to the hotel, then 
you’ll have to be accounted for. If you send the 
car home without you, then you’ll have to take a 
train or the day boat, and that may turn out to be 
awkward, too.” 

“ You’ve got the difficulties down cold,” said 
Jeffrey, “ but I’m hoping that the spur of the 
moment will supply us with something.” 

“ Wait till you’ve heard my plan,” said Gwen- 
dolen. “ Then perhaps you’ll apologize for the 
word ‘ gallery.’ ” 

“ You can’t help four people being more conspicu- 
ous than two,” said Jeffrey with a shake of the 
head. 

“ It needs people to account for the car,” Gwen- 
dolen retorted. “ Jack and I can do that tonight 
and to-morrow morning. We look pretty respect- 
able. When we turn up at the Oldborough hotel 
with a punctured tire, no matter what time of night 
204 


A NIGHT RIDE 


it is, no one will think that there’s anything queer 
about it. And you won’t have to appear at all.” 

“ You’re right,” said Jeffrey, quickly. “ I with- 
draw the word ‘ gallery ’ and apologize. In the 
morning, of course, you’ll start out for town and 
pick us up at some lonely bend of the road.” 

“ Perhaps,” said Gwendolen. “ But we thought 
we’d take two rooms — on the ground floor, be- 
cause I’ll be nervous about fire. We’ll only use one 
of them and leave the other so that if you happen 
to need a place to hide in, or change your clothes 
again, you’ll have it. We’ll leave the window open 
a little and something, oh, a towel — hanging over 
the sill so you’ll know. You may not want it, but 
it may come in handy.” 

Jeffrey laughed. “ Richards says you ought to 
be a member of the force,” he observed, “ but up- 
on my word, I believe your real talent is for 
crime.” 

“ It’s pretty much the same,” she said rather 
soberly. “ You’ve got to be able to think crimes 
either to commit them or to detect them.” 

“ I’d argue that point with you,” said Jeffrey, 
“ if duty didn’t call me out in front. That chauf- 
feur of yours knows the town like the palm of his 
hand, but it’s a dark night and once we get out on 
the country roads, a cat-eyed person like me, who 
can see in the dark, will be helpful.” 

We didn’t protest very strongly against his going, 
205 


THE GHOST GIRL 


because we had seen from his air of preoccupation 
that he wanted the solitude of his own thoughts, 
rather than our talk. 

He opened the door, slipped out on the running 
board and clambered to the seat beside the chauf- 
feur. 

His going turned loose a flood of questions and 
surmises. What puzzled Jack and me the most, 
was the object of this night journey. What pur- 
pose had Jeffrey in mind that could justify this rush 
in the dark, the risk of detection and capture in 
the very act of committing a crime? For house- 
breaking was a crime, even if one didn’t mean to 
make away with the family jewels or plate. 

“ Whatever his object is,” said Jack, “ why 
doesn’t he tell us ? ” 

“ I doubt if he could tell us any better than he 
has,” said Gwendolen. “ He’s found out enough, 
evidently, to make it clear to him that the crime 
was committed in that house and his instinct tells 
him, if he can get into the house and look at the 
actual scene, he will see something that will explain 
the crime itself!” 

Then she set me to work recounting the events of 
the afternoon — Richards’s call, Jeffrey’s arrival 
and the narrative of his adventures on his former 
visit to Beech Hill, and finally the coming of Doctor 
Crow. 

I told the story as nearly as I could in his own 
206 


A NIGHT RIDE 


words. And, as I told it, the conviction his narra- 
tive had carried with it, came back to me. 

“ I declare,” I concluded, ‘‘ I don’t see what more 
there is to explain. Jeffrey was saying just before 
Crow came in, that no case was complete as long as 
it contained a single contradictory circumstance. 
But I am blessed if I see any contradiction in that, 
because Crow’s story fits in absolutely with Rich- 
ards’s present theory of the case, with Mrs. Bar- 
ton’s confession and what Jeffrey himself heard in 
his stateroom on the night boat.” 

“ What was it that Mr. Jeffrey said, when Doctor 
Crow got through with his story? ” asked Gwen- 
dolen. 

“ Something perfectly trivial,” said I, “ about re- 
turning the photograph they’d given him to paint 
from. Doctor Crow said he could mail it to Beech 
Hill.” 

“And then?” asked Gwendolen. 

“ That was all,” said I. “ Jeffrey said he wanted 
to get it all off his mind and there wasn’t anything 
else, was there. Crow said no, and that Jeffrey 
could congratulate himself on a highly successful 
outcome.” 

There was a moment of silence. Then Gwen- 
dolen caught her breath. “ Oh,” she said. 

There was another minute of silence and then she 
asked : “ Didn’t Doctor Crow see he’d made a slip ? 
Didn’t he try to come back and say anything more? ” 
207 


THE GHOST GIRL 


“ You and Jeffrey will be the death of me,” I 
exclaimed. “Yes, he did. That is, he started to 
say something and checked himself. But how did 
you know he’d done that? How did Jeffrey know? 
What was the slip ? ” 

“ He’d forgotten the gown,” said Gwendolen. 
“ Don’t you see? They loaned Mr. Jeffrey Claire’s 
own gown to pose a model in. It was ever so much 
more valuable than the photograph, and an infin- 
itely more intimate souvenir of the girl herself. 
He couldn’t have forgotten it, unless . . 

“Unless what?” I asked, for she had hesitated 
there. 

When she went on, her voice was graver. “ Un- 
less, Cliff, he knew what had become of the gown 
— unless he’d seen it so often since, that he’d almost 
forgotten Mr. Jeffrey had it. He -couldn’t have 
forgotten it. Not when Mr. Jeffrey had spoken of 
the photograph and asked him straight out if there 
weren’t anything else.” 

“ Unless he had known what had become of the 
gown ! ” I sat for five solid minutes trying to fit 
that stubborn circumstance into Crow’s story. He 
didn’t know the gown had been stolen. He 
couldn’t have known — not if he knew no more of 
Irene Fournier than that he’d bribed her to disap- 
pear and give his patient a second chance for re- 
covery. 

“ There’s something else,” said Gwendolen 
208 


A NIGHT RIDE 


thoughtfully, — “ something else that doesn’t fit. 
There are the earrings, Cliff. He had them in his 
card-case. He dropped one of them on the rug in 
the studio and came back and tried to get it. 
Those were Claire’s earrings. How did Doctor 
Crow get them ? ” 

‘‘ That seems natural enough,” said 1. “ Miss 

Meredith brought them home with her. Very 
likely they were in the same box with the defaced 
photograph.” 

“ Then you’ll have to believe it was a ghost that 
Mr. Jeffrey saw on the bridge.” 

“ I don’t know,” said I. “ That girl might have 
been Irene.” 

“ But the earrings ! ” she cried. “ That’s 
where Mr. Jeffrey saw them. That girl was wear- 
ing them.” 

Well, I saw it at last. Not the way Jeffrey did. 
I couldn’t hope for that. It was even probable that 
Gwendolen herself, getting the story at second-hand 
from me, saw more than I did. But I saw enough 
to explain our night’s journey through the velvet 
dark — enough to give that silent house of Beech 
Hill that I had never seen, a strange, eerie attrac- 
tion. I felt, somehow, that in that house to-night, 
the mystery would be solved. 

Suddenb^ through the glass, I saw Jeffrey turn 
to the chauffeur with a quick order. The car 
checked its speed. We were on a brick paved main 
209 


THE GHOST GIRL 


street of a small town and the pasty surface didn’t 
accommodate itself well to the sudden checking of 
our speed. The car did a sweeping side slip down 
against the curb and stopped on the intersection of 
a cross street. Half a block down, I could see the 
lights of a lunch wagon. 

Jeffrey reached back and opened the door. 
“Aren’t you people getting hungry in there?” he 
said. “ I am.” 

None of us had thought of it before, but the 
realization of it came to us all at once. 

“ I’ll go down to that lunch wagon,” I volun- 
^ teered, “ and get a dozen red-hots, then we can eat 
them as we ride.” 

“ That’s a good notion,” said Jeffrey approv- 
ingly. 

I slipped from, the car and made my way up the 
dimly lighted cross street. Half way to my des- 
tination, I passed a man and a woman coming from 
the direction in which I was bound. I had my hat 
low down over my eyes and paid no attention to 
them until just as they passed me. Then I heard 
him say to her: “They’ll do until we can get a 
more civilized meal,” and I remembered having ob- 
served that he had a paper bag in his hand. 

Something about the urbane quality of his voice 
made me turn and look after them. Their appear- 
ance, as they blurred into the darkness of that dimly 
lighted street, confirmed the impression that his 


210 


A NIGHT RIDE 


voice had made — that they weren’t, any more than 
we, inhabitants of this village. He had on a long 
ulster and a motoring cap and she seemed to be 
heavily veiled. 

My principal feeling though, was one of irrita- 
tion. I had Doctqr Crow so strongly in my 
thoughts, that the very last glimpse I got of that 
disappearing back, reminded me of him. 

I went on to the lunch wagon, made my pur- 
chase, and had got almost back to the car, when I 
heard the sudden roar of a motor. It wasn’t our 
own car. That was chugging away passively on 
just enough gas to keep it turning over. But, look- 
ing ahead down the road, I saw the diminishing 
red tail-light of another car. 

Jeffrey was slouched down in his seat, his cap 
over his eyes, his head sunk forward on his chest. 
He paid no attenion to my arrival. Indeed, it 
seemed as if he had fallen asleep. He aroused 
with a start when I touched him. 

‘‘ Here you are,” said I. 

Even then he looked at me blankly for a second, 
then rose rather stiffly and climbed back into the 
interior of the car with the rest of us. 

“ We may as well eat standing still,” said he. 
“ It’s lots pleasanter.” 

Then I saw that Gwendolen was eying him curi- 
ously. 


CHAPTER XVI I 

THE HOUSEBREAKERS 

W E were standing on what felt like the road- ' 
way, Jeffrey and 1. A mile down the road, , 
we could just distinguish the purr of Jack’s limousine. 

I used the last glimpse of its head-light as it swung ^ 
around in the road, for a look at my watch. It |1 
was a quarter to two in the morning. | 

We remained where we were without moving a \ 
muscle, until it was out of hearing. Hearing and | 
touch were the only senses that gave us any contact j 
with reality at all, for the night was completely 1 
dark. The sky must have been very thickly over- | 
cast, for there wasn’t light enough overhead to | 
show the profile of the tree-tops. It was still, too. i 
There wasn’t a breath of wind, and there were none 
of the country noises that ordinarily fill the ear at 
night. 

We were, as nearly as Jeffrey had been able to 
guess, half a mile from the main entrance to Beech 
Hill estate. 

Jeffrey laid a hand on my arm. “ This way,” 
he whispered. 

What sense of direction it was that enabled him 
to keep the road, I don’t know. Perhaps he could 


THE HOUSEBREAKERS 


feel the ruts with his feet accurately enough to give 
him the direction. 

Left to myself, I’d have been lost in three min- 
utes. But Jeffrey moved along as confidently as 
if it had been broad daylight. It’s perfectly impos- 
sible to judge the flight of time under such condi- 
tions and I don’t know how far we had been walk- 
ing, when he suddenly checked me with a clutch on 
my arm. I could feel him standing as rigid as a 
setter dog making a point. 

I strained my ears, but could hear nothing, ex- 
cept the rise and fall of my own breathing. 

“ What is it? ” I whispered. “ I can’t hear any- 
thing. 

He didn’t answer, but I heard him drawing a 
deep breath through his nose. Then I realized 
that he had heard nothing himself. It was his 
sense of smell that had warned him and that reali- 
zation made me shiver somehow. 

Very cautiously, he led me over to the right, 
across the ditch and up on the other side, where 
there was a springy, soggy turf. Once there, we 
started forward again, but much more slowly and 
with infinite precaution against noise. Fifty paces 
along, I got the same warning that had checked 
Jeffrey earlier. There was something homelike 
about it, though — something that took off the hor- 
ror of the thing. It was the smell of tobacco. 
Someone ahead of us there in the dark was smoking 
213 


THE GHOST GIRL 


a pipe. A faint puff of air blew on the left side 
of our faces and carried off the pipe smoke with i 
it. The smoker, then, was somewhere ahead of us. i 
Jeffrey’s arm signaled me again and once more I 
we moved forward, but still more slowly, planting ! 
each foot with the utmost care, moving absolutely \ 
without a sound. 

The bank where we were walking seemed to be 
considerably higher than the road. At least, we l 
had climbed to get to the top of it and I wasn’t con- r 
scious of having walked down again. ■ 

The pipe smell grew stronger, and presently I 
heard a sound — the deep regular breathing of 
someone asleep. There must be two of them 
then, because the smoker was keeping his pipe j 
lighted. 

I was walking at Jeffrey’s left. That is to say, f, 
at the side of the bank nearest the road. Suddenly | 
my left hand touched something and, in my sur- | 
prise, I lost my balance a little and my weight I 
came down on it rather heavily. It isn’t easy to |j 
keep your balance walking slowly in the dark. Did [i 
you ever try it? ' 

The thing gave a little under my weight, and yet I 
it resisted stoutly. It felt like stretched leather p 
and the surface of it was gritty with dust. In a ji 

second I knew what it was. The extended top of a | 

carriage or automobile. [ 

A stronger whiff of tobacco came up just then | 


THE HOUSEBREAKERS 


and I felt the thing move a little under my hand 
and heard the faint creak of leather cushions. The 
smoker was in the vehicle there just below me, and 
he had stirred a little. Possibly the touch of my 
hand had roused him. 

I had no way of warning Jeffrey. But appar- 
ently he didn’t need it. There were ten seconds, 
I believe, when no bronze statue could have stood 
stiller than we did. Then, a step at a time, we 
moved on again. 

A little further along, we slipped down into the 
road once more and walked on again a little more 
freely. Presently Jeffrey stopped, took my hand 
and guided it out past his body, until it touched a 
surface of rough stone. 

“ The gates,” he whispered. 

Then we walked on rather briskly and with, ap- 
parently, no fear whatever of discovery. 

“ We’re in luck, so far,” said Jeffrey. 

I told him of my adventure — of the thing my 
hand had touched there in the dark. “ It was a 
carriage or an automobile, I think,” said I. 

“ An automobile,” said Jeffrey. “ Couldn’t you 
smell it?” 

‘‘What’s it doing there, do you suppose?” I 
asked. “ What are the people in it doing? ” 

“ Watching the place,” said Jeffrey. “ Seeing to 
it that no one goes in or out, without their knowing 
it.” 


215 


THE GHOST GIRt: 


“ But who’d be watching? And who are they 
watching for? ” I 

“ I don’t know,” said Jeffrey. “ We shall prob- \ 
ably find out before we’re through.” | 

“ It seems a strange place to set a watch,” I ob- i 
served. “ There must be a dozen other ways of j 
getting into and out of this place without going ■ 
through the main gate.” 

“ There’s one other way,” said Jeffrey. “ One ; 
other practical way, and that’s in a boat. This i 
place is a peninsula, with a very narrow neck and ■ 
the wall across the neck is much too high to climb !■ 
without a scaling hook, so the gate’s a pretty good 
place to set a watch. If there’s another watch on : 
the boathouse landing, as I suspect there is, then 
the job is pretty well covered.” 

“ I’d like to know then,” said I, a little anxiously, | 
“ how we’re going to get away ourselves.” | 

“ We got in, didn’t we,” said Jeffrey. “ And 
nobody knows we’re here. That, with a little i 
decent luck, is handicap enough in our favor.” | 
Somehow, the presence of watchers at the gate [ 
seemed to have relieved Jeffrey of all concern about ; 
them, now we were inside. We walked briskly, at [ 
a pace I’d never dared have taken in the dark, but [ 
for the compelling touch of his hand on my arm. | 
And if we said nothing, it seemed more because j 
Jeffrey didn’t want to talk than because he was j 
afraid to. The drive was perfectly surfaced, so j 
216 ! 


THE HOUSEBREAKERS 

there was nothing to stumble on, but sometimes we 
went up hill and sometimes down. How Jeffrey 
followed the curves in the drive, I couldn’t under- 
stand at all, unless the lateral inclination of the 
roadway from crown to curve, gave clue enough to 
that wonderful tactile sense of his. 

At last, as we reached the top of a little rise, a 
flicker of lightning in the clouds ahead of us sil- 
houetted the house. It wasn’t more than a hun- 
dred yards away. 

Jeffrey immediately left the road and struck out 
to the left. The lightning shimmered again and 
then again, more brightly each time, and it gave us 
the general direction of the house as we quartered 
around it in the arc of a circle. But, as a guide to 
what was immediately under our feet, flower beds, 
terraces, tangles of untouched wilderness, Jeffrey 
could have no guide but his memory. 

But suddenly, as we rounded the corner of a 
projecting wing, we both stopped short. There 
was a light in one of the second-story windows. 
To me, that seemed final. Entering an empty house, 
to say nothing of one whose occupants were all 
sound asleep, seemed a reckless enough proceeding 
for anyone to contemplate. In the face of the 
warning the square of light from that window gave 
us, there seemed nothing to do but count our expedi- 
tion a dead loss and make the best of our way back 
to Oldborough. 

15 


217 


THE GHOST GIRL 


“Wait a minute!” said Jeffrey. He walked 
swiftly away toward another building — a one- 
storied, concrete affair that had the look of a 
garage. 

I saw him crouch down on the slope that led up 
to its great door and explore the surface with his 
hands. Then he came back — not straight toward 
me, but at an angle, toward the corner of the house 
itself. He nodded to me to come along too and 
when we had reached the place he indicated, I saw 
that we were standing beneath an open window. 
It was some distance from the lighted one. 

“ Give me a leg up,” he whispered, “ then I can 
pull you in after me.” 

“You don’t miean . . .” I gasped. “You 

don’t mean to go in — with that light there? ” 

“ Yes, I’m going in,” he said quietly, “ and I 
warn you it will be dull waiting and mighty in- 
teresting inside. You had better come along, 
too.” 

“ All right,” said I. “ I told you I was game 
and I meant it. But I didn’t bargain for this.” 

There was light enough to see him smile by. 

This is nothing to what we’ll be up against before 
we get through,” he said. “ Come along.” 

He put his feet on my bent knee, and with a 
quick, catlike spring, was poised on the window 
ledge. Then he reached down a strong hand and 
hauled me up after him. There wasn’t a tremor 
218 


THE HOUSEBREAKERS 

In that hand. It was as steady as if he had been 
painting a portrait in his studio. 

Illogically enough, when we had scrambled over 
the sill and dropped down lightly Inside, my first 
sensation was one of disappointment. I had made 
up my mind to something thrilling and dangerous, 
committed myself by one decisive action to Jeffrey’s 
reckless course, and now wanted a run for my 
money. 

I think you will agree that I got It In the end, 
but just at first, the adventure seemed to be flat- 
tening out Into something very tame. We didn’t 
hear a sound. Our entrance had apparently dis- 
turbed no one. We were at the end of a bare, 
rather uninteresting looking corridor. At the other 
end of It, — about forty feet away — was the door 
leading, if I had kept my sense of direction straight, 
into the wing where the light was. 

The bright circle from Jeffrey’s electric torch 
flashed on that only a second, then wheeled to the 
left and revealed a narrow stairway leading straight 
up away from us to the floor above. Halfway 
down the corridor, on the right, was an opening 
which, apparently, led off at right angles. Just at 
the foot of the stairway, on the left side of the cor- 
ridor, was a door. Jeffrey flashed his torch again 
to the right of where we were standing and revealed 
another corridor parallel to the one which occurred 
further down. 


219 


THE GHOST GIRL 


Jeffrey didn’t keep his light on more than five 
seconds altogether. Then, seeming to have seen 
enough to satisfy him, he switched it out, gave me a 
hand to guide me and walked straight ahead to the 
stairway. 

I confess I didn’t like going upstairs. As long 
as we had an open window th^e that could be 
reached with a rush, and tumbled out of without 
serious risk of injury, it wasn’t so bad. But up- 
stairs ! 

It was on the second story that the light was. 
The stairs were old, too, and it seemed to me they 
creaked horribly. However, we reached the 
second floor without misadventure and found, in the 
momentary glimpse that Jeffrey’s torch afforded us, 
what seemed to be the same arrangement of corri- 
dors as on the floor below. 

The moment Jeffrey switched off the torch, he 
directed my attention to a thin thread of light that 
was coming out from under the door at the end of 
the corridor. He gave a little grunt of satisfaction 
but, to my relief, immediately led me away from it, 
back along the corridor to the point above the win- 
dow where we had got in, and then off to the left. 
At the end of ten paces, he stopped me in front of 
a door. A flicker of lightning outside, revealed 
that much. It also revealed that Jeffrey had his ear 
against the door panel. 

We stood there perfectly still for what seemed a 


220 


THE HOUSEBREAKERS 

long time to me, probably not more than twenty 
seconds. Then, perfectly calm, Jeffrey opened the 
door and went in. 

It was a big, rather nobly proportioned room, 
with a fireplace in it and a bow-window at one end 
— charmingly and rather intimately furnished, but 
with an air, somehow, of disuse. I got that gen- 
eral impression from a prolonged series of lightning 
flickers. 

Meanwhile, Jeffrey’s bull’s-eye was picking out 
details. What it seemed to rest on longest, was a 
heavy layer of dust on the bare mahogany center- 
table and on the mantel over the fireplace. There 
were two doors beside the one we had come in by, 
but the one he finally advanced to was in the oppo- 
site wall. He opened it without hesitation this 
time, and we found ourselves in a long deep clothes 
closet. The two side walls showed nothing but 
bare hooks, but the short wall at the end had a few 
nondescript articles hanging on it. I’d have turned 
away without a second glance. But Jeffrey went 
straight in and I saw him apparently scrutinizing the 
garment hanging at the far end, at close range with 
his electric torch. 

There wasn’t room for both of us in there and I 
had no idea what he could find to interest him, so I 
waited in the bow-window. The lightning was now 
almost continuous and there was an occasional mut- 
ter of thunder along with it. The storm, which 


221 


THE GHOST GIRL 


the dead stillness of an hour ago had prophesied, was 
getting near enough to be reckoned with. And, 
on the whole, I wasn’t sorry. Anything would be 
better than that breathless silence out of doors. 

What small comfort I got out of that was pres- 
ently neutralized though, by what I saw out on the 
lawn in the instantaneous illumination of a vivid 
lightning flash. Just a silhouette of a man crouch- 
ing tense behind the trunk of a big tree. He wasn’t 
watching the house. He was turned in the other 
direction. There were many watchers abroad to- 
night, and some of the watchers were watched. 
The glimpse of that crouching figure gave me a bad 
moment of panic, but Jeffrey’s voice just then put 
me back on my feet. 

“ Come along. Drew,” he said. “ We’re getting 
warm.” 

The flash of his torch showed me the way into the 
closet. Jeffrey crowded back against the side wall 
to let me pass. And then I saw behind the gar- 
ments that hung from the hooks, screening it like a 
curtain, was a low narrow door opening back. 

“ Go in,” said Jeffrey. “ It’s all right.” 

It took me a minute to see where we were. 
Then I made out a long passage of level flooring 
on the right, leading in a curve around a swelling 
dome of lath and plaster that looked like an enor- 
mous tomb. 

That’s the vaulting to the ceiling of the 
222 


room 


THE HOUSEBREAKERS 

below,” said Jeffrey. “ I suppose it’s the dining- 
room. Better let me lead, I guess.” 

He was excited and triumphant. Not so much, I 
thought, over finding the secret doorway at the bot- 
tom of the closet, but by what the tracks on the 
floor and the little chips of plaster seemed to be 
telling him. 

We circled halfway round the dome, when he 
stopped short and confidently opened another door. 
I heard him give a little gasp when he got inside, 
and squeezed through quickly beside him. He 
closed the door behind him. 

It was an extraordinary room. Not more than 
seven feet wide and fully thirty long, so that I should 
have thought of it as a corridor, had not the furni- 
ture ranged in a row along one of the walls de- 
clared plainly enough that someone had lived there. 
There was a narrow bed, a dressing-table, a chif- 
fonier, and further along than that, a row of bare 
hooks screwed into the wall at uneven intervals. 

An exclamation from Jeffrey attracted my atten- 
tion to the lighting arrangements. There were no 
regular electric fittings, but from a hole in the ceil- 
ing, an electric wire hung down a little beyond the 
dressing-table, and on the end of it, was a double 
socket with two big Tungsten lamps. 

“ They wanted light up here and plenty of it,” 
said Jeffrey. 

“But where are the windows?” I exclaimed. 

223 


THE GHOST GIRL 


There were no windows. Inside there was a 
long narrow sky-light and the carpentry of it was 
as rough and slovenly as that which had put up the 
clothes-hooks and dangled that unprotected electric 
cord through a hole In the ceiling. 

Jeffrey sat down on the low chair in front of the 
dressing-table, laid down his electric bull’s-eye and 
pulled open the one shallow drawer. What he 
found there struck me as trivial enough, but it 
seemed to interest him mightily. A well used pow- 
der-puff and a box of rice powder. 

“ A girl would have to be a pretty decided blonde, 
Drew,” he observed, “ to put on powder of that 
color and not have it show.” 

“ Jeffrey,” said I quickly, “ let’s get out of here. 
I can’t stand this room. I don’t know why, but 
there’s something sinister about It.” 

He looked around from the table and nodded at 
me soberly. “ It Is sinister,” he assented. “ It’s 
ghastly. But we’re not through yet.” 

“What Is it?” I demanded. “What Is It that 
I feel in here? I haven’t any extra sense for 
things.” 

“ In the first place,” said Jeffrey, “ It’s a con- 
cealed room. That accounts for the shape of It — ^ 
that accounts for the skylight. And It’s a con- 
cealed room that’s been used, Drew. Somebody 
lived here a good long while — unknown to the 
servants — unknown, I imagine, to the mistress of 
224 


THE HOUSEBREAKERS 

the house herself. Someone has lived here, and, if 
I am not mistaken . . He hesitated a 

second, then let me have the full value of the words. 
“ If I am not mistaken, died here. Drew.” 

He got up, with a little shiver from the dressing- 
table, carrying the bull’s-eye with him, and walked 
to the other end of the room — the end we had 
not come in by. 

Under the strong rays of light, even I could see 
from where I stood that there was another door 
there, though there was no latch nor frame — just 
a frayed, soiled outline upon the wall-paper. Jeff- 
rey turned around and leaned back against it, his 
face wearing a puzzled, thoughtful frown. His 
eyes were fixed all the time on the dressing-table 
and the wall behind it. Then his gaze went up to 
the electric wire. 

“ Nothing’s quite right in this room. Drew,” he 
said. “ Why isn’t that dressing mirror under the 
light where it would shine on both sides of the face. 
Come! Let’s put things tidy. Catch hold.” 

Already he was at one end of the dressing-table. 
I took the other and we lifted it carefully along to 
its proper position just under the electric light. 

“Ah! ” said Jeffrey. In a flash he had out his 
knife and was digging away at a small hole in the 
plaster behind where the mirror had been. 

I watched him in silence. His look was trium- 
phant enough now. In another minute he had dug 
225 


THE GHOST GIRL 


something out of the joist in the wall and was hold- 
ing it out in his palm to me. It was a small, 
slightly flattened revolver bullet. 

“Jeffrey,” I gasped, “do you work miracles? 
How did you know that was there? ” 

“ Look at the chip broken off the corner of the 
mirror,” said Jeffrey. “ The bullet did that. You 
can see the shape of it. The bullet must have gone 
somewhere. If the shot had been fired from the 
other direction, it would have gone on and smashed 
the mirror. If it had been fired by a person who 
had just come in by that door where I was standing, 
and aimed at a person sitting on that stool before 
the dressing-table, it must have gone on into the 
wall. There’s nothing difficult about that. But 
. . . Drew, let me see that bullet again.” 

I handed it back to him. He looked at it now 
with an incredulous frown. And then, to my 
amazement, clenched his hands with a gesture of 
absolute perplexity. 

“ Always the contradiction ! ” he said. “ Always 
the one contradiction. I thought I had it. But 
I’m wrong again. Drew, I’m going to see this 
thing through, if it takes the rest of my life. I’m 
going to find out what really happened in this house 
on the night of the nineteenth of December.” 

“ But Jeffrey,” I expostulated, “ what more could 
you want? What more could you hope for than 
what you’ve got already? ” 

226 


THE HOUSEBREAKERS 

“ That bullet/’ he said. “ It isn’t the right cali- 
ber, Drew.” 

Then suddenly he switched off his light and 
clutched my arm tightly. “ Listen ! ” he said. 

For a breathless moment of silence there was 
nothing. Then there came to my ears, what he had 
heard before. Distant, muffled, as if from a long 
way off, the sound of running feet. The footsteps 
were those of a man — a heavy man. The sound 
of them grew louder and then fainter again. The 
man had run down one of the corridors, fleeing in 
terror from something. The footsteps stopped ab- 
ruptly, then almost instantly went on again, running. 
But now they were growing louder. 

“ He’s coming back,” I whispered. 

“ He’s lost,” said Jeffrey. “ He’s lost his way.” 

And then, with a sudden sweep of his arm, he 
caught me and crowded me back against the wall. 
The fugitive was coming straight toward the hidden 
chamber. Was the pursuer coming, too? 

A long flicker of lightning whitened the sky-light 
and gave me a glimpse of Jeffrey’s face — tense, the 
eyes blazing with expectancy. Then came the dark 
once more. But only for a moment. The door 
at the far end of the room burst open as if someone 
had run blindly into it and at that moment a great 
crevice of white flame opened in the sky and for 
nearly a second the room blazed with light. 

The man at the door staggered in, his face whiter 
227 


THE GHOST GIRL 


than the mass of bandages wrapped around his 
neck, his eyes staring in maniacal terror. But what 
fixed my own horrified stare more than the terror 
in the man’s eyes, was a sudden red stain that I saw 
come through the bandages. The outcry he gave 
was swallowed in the crash of thunder that followed 
the lightning flash. Then, in the blacker dark that 
swallowed him up, we heard his limp body thud 
upon the floor. The door behind creaked on its 
hinges. 

Such was the fugitive. What had been the pur- 
suer? 


I 


CHAPTER XVII 


THE THIRD CONFESSION 

J EFFREY was moving in the dark and in a 
moment I heard the door pulled shut again. 

“ It’s all right,” he said quietly. “ But appar- 
ently It’s up to us to get the poor chap out of here.” 
“Who do you mean?” I whispered. 

“ Barton,” said Jeffrey. “ Didn’t you recognize 
him? ” He flashed on his torch and I stared at the 
Inert man on the floor. “ He did look pretty 
wild,” he went on. “ I don’t know that I’d have 
spotted him myself. If It hadn’t been for the ban- 
dages. Then, I half expected we might find him 
here.” 

We were both bending over the prostrate man 
now. He was unconscious — white as death, and 
with the growing smudge of red on the bandages, 
ghastly. 

“ It’s the wound his wife gave him,” said Jeff- 
rey. “ He’s broken It open again and I don’t 
wonder.” 

I . It wasn’t a very serious hemorrhage, though. 
The smudge wasn’t growing very fast and the man 
must have a lot of vitality. Already he was show- 
ing signs of coming back to consciousness. 

229 



THE GHOST GIRL ! 

“What was it that frightened him, Jeffrey?” I 
asked. “ What was it he was running away from, ; 
do you know? ” | 

“ Spooks, like enough,” said Jeffrey easily. | 
“ They’ll hardly trouble us. But what’s really 
after him may prove a handful for us. We’ve got 
to get him out of here. Drew. He can tell us more ' 
about what happened in this house that other night 
than I supposed he could when we came here. And 
if Richards once gets his hands on him, we’ll never 
know what it is he has to tell. We’ve got to get 
him out of here and into that hotel room at Old- 
borough and the sooner we get about it the better. 
Wait a minute! ” 

He pulled a small silver flask out of his pocket 
and handed it to me. “ Give him a little of that,” 
he said. 

He went away to the other end of the room, ap- 
parently to get a pillow that lay on the stripped bed. 
He didn’t come back for a minute and I hadn’t 
leisure to observe just what he was doing. For, 
with the first drop of brandy that passed his lips. 
Barton’s eyelids trembled, then opened a little and I 
found him looking at me with an unseeing stare. 

“ It was her face,” he said. “ Did she follow you, 
too?” Then rousing a little more he frowned at 
me as though I were not whom he thought. 
“Where am I?” he whispered. “And who are 
you?” 


230 


THE THIRD CONFESSION 

‘‘ You’re all right,” Jeffrey whispered, coming up 
with the pillow. “ We’re friends. We’re going to 
get you out of here.” 

“ Then I am here,” he said with a shudder. 

“ In the Beech Hill House? ” said Jeffrey. “ Oh, 
yes, but you won’t be long. We’re friends, I tell 
you. You’ve nothing to worry about. Drink some 
more of the brandy, and then we’ll see if you can go 
on your own pins.” 

There was another flare of lightning and a crash 
of thunder and this time it was followed by a roar 
of rain upon the skylight. The sound seemed to 
horrify Barton anew, to the very verge of panic. 

“ Make it stop. I can’t stand that noise.” 

Jeffrey nodded assent to my look of inquiry and 
each of us taking an arm, we raised him to his feet. 
For some reason that I could not understand, Jeffrey 
did not avail himself of his torch, and we felt our 
way along in the dark. I noticed that the side 
pocket of Barton’s coat was bulging with something 
heavy, and I felt more like a burglar than ever I had 
had leisure to feel since we had got into this room. 

We squeezed through the low door into the 
closet and then out into the big room with the bow 
window. When we got out into the corridor I 
almost balked, for the thread of light still shone 
through under the door and we had to go almost up 
to it to reach the head of the stairs. They weren’t 
wide enough for three of us to go abreast so Jeffrey 
231 


THE GHOST GIRL 


went ahead and I, supporting Barton, followed. To I 
my surprise, he didn’t go to the open window where 
we had come in, but turned off to the left, conducted | 
us down a corridor, shot a bolt or two, opened the ' 
door and let us out into a little brick-paved pergola 
where the rain was now splashing down in torrents. : 

“ It’s always easier to get out of a house than ; 
into it,” he said, falling back abreast of us and tak- 
ing Barton’s other arm. i 

The roar of the rain drowned the necessity for :i 
caution, and he spoke as naturally as if we had been i 
sitting in his studio. “ Better give him another { 
swallow of the flask. Drew. Oh, never mind the j 
rain. It will do us all good. I only hope it doesn’t , 
stop.” I 

Barton took a big drink and then, without another || 
word, we set out as briskly as we dared down the ii 
brick-paved path. I; 

“ Confound it,” said Jeffrey presently, “ the rain’s j 
slacking up.” ■ 

“ The clouds are breaking, too,” said I, and I | 
pointed over to the right where a patch of gray sky i 
appeared behind the black curtain. The curtain j 
had a fringe of silver, too. There’d be a moon [ 
before long. As a matter of fact, under a swift ! 
westerly breeze, the sky was clearing with alarming i 
rapidity. Alarming to me, at least. To my mind I 
that group of watchers at the gate — the man who 1 
had slept and the man who had smoked his pipe, I 
232 , ; 


THE THIRD CONFESSION ^ 

and heaven knew how many more beside, were get- 
ting more formidable every moment. 

But Jeffrey walked on, not seeming in the least 
disturbed, although we could now see the roadway 
plainly enough, up to where it was swallowed in the 
darkness of a grove of trees. 

“ Isn’t the gate just beyond there? ” I whispered. 

He nodded. Then I saw him turn a look of real 
concern on our capture. Barton had gone pretty 
white again and was already turning limp on our 
hands. 

“Take one more drink,” said Jeffrey encourag- 
ingly, “ and then do exactly what I tell you. 
There’s nothing to worry about. Keep on walking 
till you get to the trees, then turn a little to the 
right, so that you parallel the path to the gate. 

Take care to keep tolerably well hidden. You don’t 
have to be too careful about it. But be sure and get 
close to the gate. Then wait there, whatever hap- 
pens, until you see the men come in. I think they’ll 
all come in. At any rate they won’t leave more 
than one, and you can deal with him, if you have 
to. Drew, as circumstances seem to dictate. But 
don’t look for trouble. As soon as the men have 
come in through the gate, you slip out and start 
straight down the road. And don’t bother about 
anything you hear coming behind you.” 

He shot another look at Barton. “ Better now? ” 
he asked. “ All right.” 

16 


233 


THE GHOST GIRL 

Without waiting for any answer he crossed the 
road and soon lost himself to our view in the trees 
on the other side. Barton and I walked forward as 
he had instructed, took shelter gladly enough when 
we could get it, and then paralleled the path down 
to the gate. 

It seemed strange to catch another whiff of 
tobacco as we pulled up there. The man was still 
smoking. It seemed hours — years — since we had 
left him there. I leaned Barton up against a tree ^ 
just inside the gate and settled myself to await i 
developments. | 

They weren’t long coming. It couldn’t have |i 
been two minutes after we had taken our position, 
when I heard a cry of alarm — a shout — a revolver I 
shot — the sound of someone running, plunging ! 
' heavily through the underbrush — and then the | 
shrill scream of a policeman’s whistle — or what j 
sounded like it. The effect on the watchers outside | 
was, as might be expected, instantaneous. They ; 
came tumbling through the gate, three of them, j 
running in the dazed manner of men just startled by • 
a sudden alarm. I remember seeing the smoker | 
putting his pipe in his pocket with one hand while 
he tugged at a revolver with the other. 

Without Jeffrey’s explicit instructions, I should 
have left Barton to take his chance and tried to go 
to my friend’s assistance. For the terror of the 
outcry, the revolver shot, and the sound of that 

234 


THE THIRD CONFESSION 

heavy body plunging, blundering among the trees, 
were all ^ ery realistic and not less ominous. 

But previous experience had taught me that it 
wasn’t easy to improve on his instructions. So I 
obeyed them literally. Barton and I were out in 
the road in no time at all, and making the best time 
his condition would allow away from Beech Hill. 

I remember thinking as we trudged along, that I 
could promise myself one thing with a good deal of 
confidence. That was that I’d never go inside those 
gates again. If anyone had prophesied that I 
should find myself there once more before the light 
of another morning I should have called him a 
lunatic. After all, though, I didn’t go in through 
the gates. 

We tramped along in a glum silence. What 
Barton’s thoughts might be I didn’t know. He 
seemed to be moving by a dogged effort of will at 
every step. For myself, Twas worried about Jeff- 
rey. But suddenly even the thought of him was 
swallowed up in the alarming realization that behind 
us on the road was an approaching automobile. It 
was coming along pretty fast, too. 

I had begun looking about in the moonlit bright- 
ness for something that would serve for cover to 
hide in until it should go by when I remembered the 
last thing Jeffrey had said. 

“ Don’t mind anything you hear coming from 
behind.” 


235 


THE GHOST GIRL 


So though It seemed like courting immediate cap- 
ture, I gripped Barton’s arm a little more firmly 
and we plodded doggedly on. The car came 
rapidly nearer. Then as it got to a position where 
its driver must have been able to see us, I heard it 
slowing down. Of course we had given it ample 
room to pass and the sudden checking of its speed 
was so ominous that if it hadn’t been too late I’d . 
have tried for a bolt even then. 

The clutch was out as it came alongside, creaking 
in the dark. And then I got another surprise; the 
sound of Jeffrey’s chuckle from the driver’s seat. 

“ All right,” he said. “ Tumble in and I’ll take 
you into Oldborough in no time.” 

But Barton stood stock still in the road. “ I 
don’t know who you are,” he said, “ nor what you’re 
trying to do. I don’t know what you’ve been doing 
nor I don’t care. But I’m not going to make any 
get-away. I have had enough. If you want to 
take me to the police station in Oldborough, all 
right. If you don’t, why go your ways and leave 
me here.” 

“ I don’t know yet,” said Jeffrey, soberly, ex- 
actly what it is that you’ve got on your conscience. 
I’ve no idea of helping you to escape from the 
penalty of it. But if you do what you just said — 
go now and give yourself up, there’s a worse man 
than you who’ll get off. You’ve got a queer story 
to tell. The police won’t believe it, but we will and 
236 


THE THIRD CONFESSION 


we want you to tell it to us first. He’s a devil, 
Barton. Don’t play straight into his hand. Jump 
in.” 

Without another word Barton obeyed and 
dropped back with a sigh of exhaustion against the 
cushions in the tonneau. I was about to follow 
him when Jeffrey beckoned me to take the front 
seat beside himself. 

“ I suppose,” said I as we started on again, “ that 
this is the car the men were watching in. Don’t 
you think you’ve got us in pretty deep by taking 
it?” 

“ I don’t see that,” said Jeffrey. “ According to 
the stenciling on the inside of the top, it’s the 
property of Wellgood’s Garage in Oldborough. I 
found it abandoned on the road and I’m taking it 
back. I’ll give them my own name and tell them 
that they can find me up till to-morrow morning at 
the hotel. Incidentally, I may find out who hired 
the car. Not that I haven’t a pretty good guess 
already.” 

“ We’ll stop first at the main entrance of the 
hotel. You can take Barton in the front door, find 
out the number of Jack’s rooms from the register 
and take him there. Gwendolen’s idea of the towel 
hanging out of the window was interesting, but per- 
haps a little theatrical. And besides, I don’t believe 
Barton could get in through another window to- 
night to save his life. Get him into bed and give 

237 


THE GHOST GIRL 

him some more brandy. I’ll be back from the gar- 
age in ten minutes. Forget that we’re house- 
breakers, Drew. Nobody knows it but ourselves.” 

Jeffrey often gave advice that looked pretty hard 
to follow, though the difficulties in the way of it 
often vanished miraculously when one walked 
straight up to them. This case was no exception. 
Until I met the eye of the sleepy clerk in the little 
Oldborough hotel, I felt as If I had “ burglar ” 
written all over me in letters no one could fail to 
read. As for Barton, I thought when I got a look 
at him that he was enough to discredit the respec- 
tability of Mr. Carnegie. 

But when I walked boldly up to the register, and 
the clerk instead of ringing the fire alarm and shout- 
ing for the police, had offered me a worn pen dipped 
in gummy Ink to register with, my career of crime 
dropped off me like a cloak and I was my own man 
again. I told the clerk It would be necessary to 
call Mr. Marshall and that I believed he had en- 
gaged an extra room for my companion and myself. 
He did look a bit queerly at Barton for a minute 
but he made no trouble about doing as I asked. 

Jack opened the door of the unoccupied room in 
answer to my knock just In time to catch Barton as 
he toppled and fell In a second faint. He recov- 
ered consciousness rather quickly after we had laid 
him on the bed, but It was evident that the man was 
not far from the end of his physical resources. We 
238 


THE THIRD CONFESSION 

were debating — Gwendolen had slipped on Jack’s 
automobile coat and joined the conference — 
whether it would be safe to let him go till morning 
without sending for a doctor, when Jeffrey came 
back. 

‘‘ I was right in my guess as to who hired the 
automobile,” he said. “ It was Richards. I left 
word that if he wanted any explanation of the dis- 
appearance of the car, he could come here, and I 
imagine he’ll turn up within an hour or two.” 

He went over and sat down beside Barton on the 
bed. “ You know who Richards Is, don’t you? ” 

The man nodded Indifferently. 

“ When Richards comes,” Jeffrey went on, “ the 
affair will be taken out of our hands. But If 
you’ll tell us the truth now, we’ll be able to help 
you.” 

“ I’m past help,” said Barton. “ It doesn’t mat- 
ter what happens to me.” 

“ It matters to other people, though,” said Jeff- 
rey. “You aren’t the only one who’s fallen into 
Crow’s clutches.” 

At the mention of Crow’s name an extraordinary 
change came over Barton. Spots of bright color 
appeared In his cheeks and he breathed quickly for 
a minute, like a man who has been running. 

“ You said Crow was a devil,” he said, “ and 
you’re right. It’s no use trying to prove anything 
on him. That’s what I tried to do. But It was no 


239 


THE GHOST GIRL 


good. Let him alone or he’ll get you where he got 
me. He and . . 

He stopped short and his eyes widened as if once 
more he saw a ghostly face in front of him and his 
own turned the color of the dingy sheets. 

“WeVe got him, Barton,” said Jeffrey quietly. 
“ All we need is your help. Tell us the story.” 

Barton stared at him a moment with a feverish 
look of hope, then, with a sigh, sank back against 
the pillow. “ It’s no use,” he said. “ You wouldn’t 
believe it.” 

“ I can tell you part of it now,” said Jeffrey. 
“ Shall I? Your wife has told us part of the story 
already. How the woman you know as Irene Four- 
nier came to your house and rented a room there, 
how she began giving you tips about your clients; 
how she told you about Miss Meredith and how 
Miss Meredith came. It was after Miss Mere- 
dith’s first visit, wasn’t it, that Crow came and saw 
Irene? You found out about that somehow, though 
Irene didn’t mean you to. She gave you some sort 
of explanation of Crow’s visit and of his identity 
that prevented you from suspecting anything then. 

“ But afterwards, when she disappeared, you 
thought of Crow and tracked him as a means of 
finding her. It was nothing but a business proposi- 
tion to you, was it? Miss Meredith was too good 
game to let go so easily.” 

“ No,” said Barton. “ That wasn’t it. Crow is 
240 


THE THIRD CONFESSION 

a devil right enough, but that woman was a witch. 
I knew from the first that she was playing with me 
« — using me. I knew every time she let her hands 
touch me, that it was only to turn me into a puppet 
to do her bidding and dance when she pulled the 
string.” 

Jeffrey looked at him incredulously. He 
frowned and shrank a little away from Barton. 
“So that was in it, too, was it?” he asked in a 
changed voice. 

“ That was all there was in it. What did I care 
about Miss Meredith and her money? We were 
doing a good business. We didn’t want to black- 
mail anybody. But Irene ... I tell you I 
wanted her. I knew I’d never have her. I knew 
she despised me and laughed at me. She hadn’t 
the heart of a panther. And yet, when she wanted 
to — when she looked at me with those big blue, 
innocent eyes of hers, she could make me believe 
anything she said. She used to tell me stories about 
when she was a child — the games they used to play 
and the work in the fields. She said her folks were 
peasants, and she’d tell me how they used to make 
the cider in the fall.” 

“That was in France?” said Jeffrey. 

Barton nodded. “ She dressed up once for me in 
peasant’s dress and she looked like — an angel, I 
tell you.” 

“What part of France?” asked Jeffrey. 

241 


THE GHOST GIRE 


“ Normandy, she said. Oh, it was all lies, I sup- 
pose. She’d got the costume for some fancy ball. 
But when she told me, with^ that soft, appealing sort 
of look, about how she’d never had any mother and 
how she’d been brought up by an aunt she hated | 
and who hated her, and had never had any love or ] 
kindness . . . Oh, she drove me crazy!” I 

“ Then,” said Jeffrey, “ when you found out | 
where she was and went to Beech Hill, it wasn’t | 
because Miss Meredith was there. But why did ' 
Irene go to Beech Hill? Was it Miss Meredith | 
with her? Or was it — Doctor Crow?” 

“ Both, I think. Miss Meredith first and the 
money — that was the big thing, but the other was 
in it. That’s why, at last . . .” 

He broke off again, panting. 

“ You went to Beech Hill,” said Jeffrey. “ And 
you found Irene there. How did you do that? 
She was hidden.” 

Barton’s eyes widened in a frightened stare. 

“ How did you know that? ” he demanded. 

“ She was hidden in the room where we found 
you to-night. Crow knew she was there, of course. 
Did Miss Meredith know? Or anyone else? ” 

“ Miss Meredith saw her,” said Barton, slowly 
and breathlessly. “ But she didn’t know she was 
there.” 

“ Saw her,” I echoed, “ but didn’t know she was 
there I ” 

242 


THE THIRD CONFESSION 

“ Yes, yes,” said Jeffrey. “ That’s what he 
means. That’s it.” 

He glanced at Barton, expecting him to go on, 
but his eyes had dropped shut and his breathing was 
pretty faint. “ Take a few minutes to rest,^’ said 
Jeffrey. “ There’s lots of time.” 

Then he turned on Gwendolen, Jack and me. 
“Don’t you see?” he said. “Aren’t you begin- 
ning to get the pattern now? Most of Crow’s 
story was true. The old lady had come back with 
the delusion that she had killed her niece. Crow 
found the photograph and explained the delusion, 
but he couldn’t be sure the girl was dead. He 
never had any valid assurance, or he wouldn’t have 
been so keen to find out whether I mightn’t have 
seen her in Paris. 

“ But he did a clever thing, substituting the photo- 
graph. He must have thought then that he had all 
the cards in his hands. Exactly how the discovery 
came to him that he hadn’t, I don’t know. It’s 
possible that the girl made a first attempt at recov- 
ering her own name and position and her rightful 
share — mind you it was rightfully hers — of her 
aunt’s property, by some perfectly direct and honest 
course. She may have written to Miss Meredith 
— may have attempted to see her, only to find all 
those attempts frustrated by Crow’s watchful- 
ness. 

“ That’s pure guesswork. But then she hung 
243 


THE GHOST GIRL 


out the lure we know about and it worked. She 
got Miss Meredith to come to the Bartons just once 
and once was enough. That brought Crow to his 
knees. He found her and made a bargain with her. 
Perhaps Barton’s story will help us conjecture what | 
the terms of that bargain were. Certainly there ! 
was a good basis for bargaining, because there was | 
enough for both of them. 

“ Anyway, she was to come to Beech Hill — not 
as a living person, but as a ghost. She was to 
haunt that old woman, probably direct her actions 
with all the authority that visitors from the spirit 
world are supposed to possess, and she was to play 
into Crow’s hands. The only thing I don’t under- 
stand, is how she quite dared to bargain with Crow. 
She knew he was dangerous.” 

“ She dared anything,” said Barton faintly, “ and 
she was clever enough, too. You’re right about 
what she did, but I don’t see how you could find it 
out.” 

“How did you find it out?” said Jeffrey. 

“ That’s what I am curious about.” 

“ I’ll tell you what happened,” he said. “ I can 
go on now.” 

It was two or three minutes, though, before he 
did go on and when he began to speak again, he 
seemed to be hesitating — not like one who is in- 
venting, but like a witness, very careful for the 
truth. 


244 


THE THIRD CONFESSION 


“ I traced her to Oldborough,” he said, “ and 
made sure she had gone to Beech Hill. I heard 
about the place from townspeople — how remote 
and lonely it was, and of course that I knew would 
make it harder for me to get a chance to see her and 
talk to her. 

“ But it seemed they had great trouble keeping 
servants. I am an experienced indoor servant my- 
self. It was what I found out about smart people 
from being a butler that started me in the spiritualist 
business. So that seemed to be my chance. There 
were people who said that the old lady was crazy, 
but the general opinion seemed to be that she had 
her own way when Crow wasn’t about. 

“ So I waited until he drove to town one day, 
apparently bound for the city and then I went to 
Beech Hill and applied for a position as butler. 
Miss Meredith hired me — seemed mighty glad to 
get me. She told me to serve dinner that night in 
her sitting-room. 

“ She wasn’t expecting Doctor Crow to come 
back, I am sure. He did come back, though, just 
before dinner time. But he didn’t see me, as I 
was in the pantry getting Miss Meredith’s dinner 
ready to serve. 

“ I heard the car drive up and I supposed it was 
him come back, but I didn’t know for sure until I 
knocked on the door of Miss Meredith’s upstairs 
sitting-room. And then I heard him talking to her. 

245 


THE GHOST GIRL 

She called to me to come in and I came with the 
dinner. 

“ He started right out of his chair at the sight of 
me, turned his back toward her and stood staring at 
me with the most devilish look I ever saw in a man’s 
face. He asked me in a low sort of voice who I 
was and what I was doing there, though I think he 
knew the answer to both questions. I didn’t say 
anything and as I expected, she answered. 

“ ‘ Oh,’ she said, ‘ he’s all right. He’s the new 
butler I’ve engaged.’ 

“‘Well,’ he said, ‘I will discharge him — now 
— at once. And the sooner you pack out of here 
the better it will be for you.’ 

“ Then he turned to Miss Meredith. ‘ It just 
happens, luckily enough,’ he said, ‘ that I have seen 
this fellow before. I know who he is.’ 

“ ‘ I don’t care about keeping him,’ she said, ‘ but 
I want somebody. I’m tired of being so badly 
waited upon.’ 

“ Then she turned to me. ‘ Serve my dinner, 
Barton,’ she said, as quietly as if nothing had hap- 
pened. 

“ She was sitting at a center table out in the room, 
with her back to one of the doors. The door was 
shut, I am sure. I turned away to put my tray 
down on a side table and then turned back ready 
to lay the cloth. I hadn’t looked away for more 
than a few seconds. But when I turned back, there 
246 


THE THIRD CONFESSION 

' was Irene herself in the room. There hadn’t been 
a sound and there wasn’t any now, until Doctor 
Crow spoke. He wasn’t paying any attention to 
Irene any more than if she hadn’t been there. Miss 
I Meredith didn’t speak to her either — just sat per- 
I fectly still, looking at her in a queer, fixed sort of 
[ way. 

“ Crow said: ‘ I believe I’ll dine with you here, 
if I may.’ And then he turned to me and said: 
‘ Go and attend to it, Barton. I’ll serve Miss 
Meredith.’ 

I “ By that time Irene had walked around the table 
I and sat down in the chair that Crow seemed to have 
meant to take himself. And then I heard Miss 
Meredith say, in a queer, dry sounding voice: 
j “ ‘ She’s here again. She’s sitting in that chair.’ 

! And she stretched out her arm and pointed at Irene. 

“ ‘ In that chair? ’ said Crow. ‘ Why, I’ll sit in 
it myself and show you.’ He moved again toward 
the chair where Irene was sitting, saying, ‘ There’s 
i no one here.’ 

“ But before he could lay his hand on the chair 
back. Miss Meredith screamed. ‘ Don’t touch her,’ 
she said. ‘ Don’t touch her.’ 

“ And Crow, in a soothing sort of way, as though 
he were just humoring her, said ‘ All right. Per- 
: haps she’ll go away in a minute.’ 

“ Of course I saw their game in a minute — what 
1 they were trying to do with her, and why Crow was 


THE GHOST GIRL 


so anxious to get rid of me. What I didn’t see 
was why Irene should have come in like that when 
she knew I was there. But I caught a look that 
Crow shot at her when he was where Miss Mere- 
dith couldn’t see his face, and it was perfectly mur- 
derous. And then I knew! She had taken me in 
on it, to give her a hold against Crow. She was 
afraid of him. 

“ The hold worked all right.^ Crow came to me 
as soon as I had gone downstairs. He didn’t pala- 
ver or make any excuse. He simply said that it 
would be as much as my life was worth to try to 
break up the game and that it would be to my ad- 
vantage, if I played it. Of course he didn’t want 
me to go now that I had found out what the game 
was. 

“ I wasn’t afraid of him really and I didn’t want 
the money he offered me, but I did want Irene. I 
wanted to stay there where I could be a protection 
to her. I wanted to see her — talk to her. I had 
a sort of hope that perhaps I could get her to leave 
the place and come away with me, although I knew 
In my heart that that was just part of my folly. 
But I could get no chance to talk to her. 

“ I saw her nearly every day, but It was always 
the same as that first time. She’d appear — some- 
times In the evening, sometimes In broad day — 
generally In Miss Meredith’s sitting-room. Crow 
and I would pretend she wasn’t there — walk 
248 


THE THIRD CONFESSION 

around her as if she didn’t exist. And often the 
old lady would pretend not to see her too and never 
say a word. Irene would come in for a minute and 
then disappear. 

“ I didn’t like the game, but what I liked still 
less, was Crow’s looks. Crow — Crow was begin- 
ning to go mad himself, just as I had done. It got 
so that he couldn’t help looking at Irene himself, 
even when he was pretending she wasn’t there. I 
could tell by her face, too, that she knew what 
was happening to him. More than that, that she 
was doing it herself. Oh, I knew her! And I 
finally made up my mind that I’d find her at any 
risk and put an end to the game one way or 
another. 

“ I did find her. I had been watching Crow. I 
knew his habits pretty well — knew when he was in 
his rooms in the east wing of the house and when 
he wasn’t. Finally one day, I let myself into his 
study with a pass-key. I spent more than an hour 
there and I found some queer things among his 
papers, too, though I didn’t care so much about 
them then. But all at once I heard a sound of 
someone coming — not by the corridor. 

“ I made for the corridor door and had just got 
it open, but hadn’t had time to get outside, when 
the door of his boot closet opened and Crow stepped 
out. It was a tiny little closet and I was sure he 
hadn’t been thefe all the time I was in his room. 


17 


249 


THE GHOST GIRL 

Besides, I heard him coming. So I thought I knew 
the way to find Irene. 

“ I made some excuse to Crow about Miss Mere- 
dith having told me to find him and about his door 
being unlocked. I knew he didn’t believe it, but I 
didn’t care. He didn’t seem to care much either 
about my trespassing, for he started out to find Miss 
Meredith. 

“ I pretended to go away, too, but I was back in 
ten seconds and into his room and into the boot 
closet and there I found a passage that ended at last 
in the room where Irene was.” 

We had to give him another few minutes’ rest 
after that. I didn’t wonder at the horror I had 
seen in his face. If he could remember things 
like that, whose mere recital made my blood run 
cold! 

Finally Jeffrey prompted him. “ You found her 
in the long room. She wasn’t dressed — at least 
not completely. She was sitting on the low stool 
in front of her dressing-table, looking into her mir- 
ror. It was a stormy night and there was a roar of 
rain on the skylight that kept her from hearing 
you.” 

We were all staring at him and I think all our 
hearts stopped beating for a second when Barton, 
with a thoughtful nod, said simply, “ Yes, it was 
like that.” 

“ How was she dressed, exactly? ” Jeffrey asked. 

250 


THE THIRD CONFESSION 

“ When I came in? She was all dressed except 
the gown.” 

The white satin gown? ” 

“ Yes. That’s what she always wore when she 
appeared to Miss Meredith.” 

‘‘ She was getting ready for another appearance 
then?” 

“ Yes.” 

“ How could you be sure, if she hadn’t on the 
gown? ” 

“ She had her face made up very pale and she was 
doing her hair the way she always wore it at those 
times. The way it was in the photograph and in 
the portrait.” 

“ You stood and watched her for a while. Then 
what did you do? ” 

“ I saw her revolver, a little silver mounted re- 
volver, lying on the dressing-table beside her. I 
guess she always had it within reach those days. 
She hadn’t heard me or seen me yet, so I stepped 
over quickly and picked it up. I don’t know 
whether that frightened her or not, but she didn’t 
show any sign of it — just looked around at me 
with that queer little smile of hers and said: 

“‘What do you want with that?’ 

“ I said, ‘ I’m not going to hurt you with it ’ — 
and before God I meant that then. I said, ‘ I’m 
just going to have a little talk with you and I 
thought we’d leave revolvers out of it. I’ve got 
251 


THE GHOST GIRL 


one of my own.’ And I pulled it out of my pocket 
as I said that. It was a big automatic.” 

“ What caliber? ” asked Jeffrey. 

“ 38,” said Barton. “ I laid the two down side 
by side on the chiffonier and then, to have them out 
of my reach, as well as hers, I went back to the 
door. She paid no more attention to me than if I 
hadn’t been there — went on fixing her hair and 
began humming a little tune. Not very loud, but 
not so very soft either, in a kind of high carrying 
voice. The rain had stopped as suddenly as it had 
begun and the sound of that little French tune filled 
my ears. 

“ ‘ Stop it,’ I said, ‘ and listen to me.’ 

“ She stopped good humoredly enough, looked 
round at me and smiled with her eyebrows up. 
‘ Well, big silly? ’ she asked. ‘ What do you want 
to say? ’ 

“ ‘ I want you to quit this game,’ I said. * I 
want you to get out of here — with me. Put on 
your own dress instead of that satin thing and come 
away.’ 

“‘Without a single farewell appearance?’ she 
mocked. ‘ That wouldn’t be polite. I’ll go after 
that,” she said. ‘Once more and I’ll be, through. 
The game will be played, my good Barton — 
played and finished to-night’ 

“ Something about her mocking smile maddened 
me. ‘ It’s finished now,’ I said. ‘ I haven’t come 
252 


THE THIRD CONFESSION 

here to be made a fool of. I’ve come to talce you 
away and you’re coming with me. Put on your 
dress.’ 

“ Still she showed no sign of anger. She went 
on smiling. ‘ You’re very unreasonable,’ she said, 
‘ but you’re very big. I’ll go with you now, if you 
like. What does Doctor Crow matter?’ 

“ I tell you I suspected her then. I knew in my 
mind she was tricking me and yet I wouldn’t be- 
lieve it. 

“ She held out her hand to me. ‘ Come here,’ 
she said. 

“ I could no more have kept away from her than 
a bird could keep away from a snake. I started 
over toward her. She began humming her tune 
again. Somehow that warned me. I stood still 
and listened — not to the tune, but for something 
else and I heard it behind me — just a faint creak 
of something. 

“ I went back all in one jump, catching up one 
of the revolvers off the chiffonier as I did so, and 
I got back to the door just in time to feel it push- 
ing open. I put my weight against it and held it. 

“ She didn’t know I had felt the door opening, so 
she kept up the bluff. ‘ You’re easily frightened 
for so big a man,’ she said. ‘ What did you think 
I was going to do to you ? ’ and she took up the tune 
again. 

“ Somehow that made me see red. I knew she’d 
253 


THE GHOST GIRL 


have let me be killed with no more pity than one 
might feel for a rat in a trap. 

“ ‘ I know what I’m going to do to you,’ I said, 
and I fired. And then all the strength went out of 
me and I leaned back against the door and watched 
her. 

“ She gave a little sob of pain and then slipped 
down quite slowly from the stool to the floor. I’d 
never seen anyone die before. I can see her now as 
she lay there on the floor — her hand over her 
heart where I had shot her.” 

“Was there much blood?” asked Jeffrey. 

Barton shook his head. “ She had her hand 
clasped over the wound, I tell you. She was all 
white — white as marble.” 

“Which hand?” asked Jeffrey. “Which hand 
was over the wound? ” 

It seemed a trivial question to ask and Barton 
seemed a little perplexed by it. “ The left,” he 
said presently. “Yes, the left — of course.” 

“ What did you do then? ” Jeffrey asked. 

“ I tried to get out the door behind me, but I 
couldn’t open it. There was no latch on the inside. 
So I had to go out the other door. I had to step 
over her where she lay. I don’t remember much 
after that. There was a queer curved passage 
around what looked like a tomb, and then rooms 
— the ordinary rooms of the house. I don’t re- 
member where I went.” 


254 


THE THIRD CONFESSION 

“What did you do with your revolver?” asked 
Jeffrey. 

“ I don’t know.” 

“ Which revolver was it you shot her with? ” 

“ I don’t know. I saw red, I tell you. I didn’t 
know what I was doing. I remember meeting one 
of the servants ip a corridor. She screamed at 
sight of me, but I pointed my revolver at her and 
told her to be still. And then, somehow, I found 
myself outdoors — out in the dark and I began run- 
ning. Then there was a crash and everything went 
out. I suppose I must have run into a tree. 

“ I don’t know how long I lay unconscious. The 
next thing I know I was back in that room — that 
horrible room. It was daylight and the house was 
quite still. There was a terrible throbbing pain in 
my head. I was lying huddled up in a corner of 
the room on the floor and the first thing I did was 
to look to see if Irene’s body was lying there too. 
But it wasn’t. And then I saw her lying on the 
bed, all dressed in her white satin gown, the body 
laid out quite straight and the hands crossed on the 
breast. 

“ I got up and went over to her. I couldn’t keep 
away. There was a slip of paper lying there be- 
tween her hands with just a line written on it. It 
said, ‘ Dispose of your work and you won’t be fol- 
lowed.’ ” 

“ Did you know the handwriting? ” Jeffrey asked. 

255 


THE GHOST GIRL 


“ It wasn’t handwriting. It had been written on 
a typewriter.” 

Somehow, in all that narrative of horror, that 
one fact stands out grisliest of all — the figure of a 
man clicking off that message on a typewriter. 

“ I stayed there all day,” Barton went on, “ with- 
out hearing a single sound. Toward dark I went 
out and looked about the house. It was empty. 
Crow, Miss Meredith, even the servants were gone. 

“ There wasn’t any question in my mind of what 
I had to do. I must take the body to the river. 
When it had got fully dark, I did it.” 

“Did you carry the body all the way?” asked 
Jeffrey. 

“ No,” said Barton. “ There was a little two- 
wheeled truck in the lower corridor that they used 
for moving trunks about. I used that. I took her 
down to the boathouse landing and put her in the 
water. But the current sets in there and I had to 
get a boat out to get into the channel, you know. 

“ I had meant to go on across the river and escape 
from there, but I was afraid to leave the boat — 
afraid to leave a clue. So I went back to the boat- 
house and put the boat away. 

“ I skirted the river on foot and waded around 
the end of the wall and then set out to walk to Old- 
borough. It had begun to turn very cold even then, 
and I was nearly frozen when the early train came 
along and I got aboard. I think I must have been 
256 


THE THIRD CONFESSION 

delirious before I got off the train. I hadn’t any 
intention of going home, but by the time we had got 
back to town, I was in a raging fever and didn’t 
know what I was doing. The next thing I knew, 
I was in my bedroom in my wife’s house. 

“ You told the story to your wife? ” asked Jeff- 
rey. 

But Barton shook his head. “ She never asked. 
I think she suspected when she found me painting 
out Irene’s picture.” 

“ She suspected before that,” said Jeffrey. “ She 
found Irene’s revolver in your pocket.” 

“ I wanted to tell her,” said Barton, ‘‘ but some- 
how, I couldn’t. We never talked about it at all, 
until the day we tried to give the seance. I didn’t 
know she had the revolver that day, until I saw it 
in her hand. Then I tried to get it away from her. 
I really don’t know anything that has happened 
since then. As soon as I got away from that house, 
I started up here. I thought maybe I could get the 
goods on Crow. I don’t know anything about my 
wife, where she is, or what she’s doing. I tried to 
call her up on the ’phone, one day, but didn’t get 
any answer.” 

“ No,” said Jeffrey, “ you couldn’t get any 
answer. She was arrested the day of the seance 
for the murder of Irene Fournier. She confessed 
that she did it.” 

Barton sat up straight and then tried to get up 

257 


THE GHOST GIRL 


off the bed. “ They sha’n’t keep her another day,” 
he said. “ She had nothing to do with it. She 
confessed to save me.” 

“ Yes,” said Jeffrey, “that’s what she did. She 
thought you had done it, just as you do. But, Bar- 
ton, you didn’t kill Irene Fournier any more than 
she did.” 


CHAPTER XVIII 


A QUESTION OF CENTIMETERS 

B arton tried impatiently to shake off his 
hands. “ It’s no use talking to me like that. 
I’ve been out of my head once or twice to-night, but* 
I’m not now. I’ve told you the truth. Every word 
of it — literal truth.” 

“ I know you have,” said Jeffrey. “ I could 
check up most of It. But you didn’t kill the woman 
you know as Irene Fournier. Your wife thinks you 
did and she confessed to save you. Miss Meredith 
thinks she killed her — killed Claire Meredith that 
Is, who I believe to be the same person, and you — 
you think that you killed her. But you’re all 
wrong.” 

“What are you talking about?” said Barton. 
“ Didn’t I fire a revolver at her? Didn’t I see her 
die under my eyes?” 

“You were standing with your back against the 
door,” said Jeffrey, “ when you fired at her. She 
was sitting In front of the dressing-table on a low 
stool. Her right side was toward you, wasn’t it? 
She hadn’t moved — hadn’t turned toward you, 
when you fired ? ” 

Barton shook his head dumbly. 

259 


THE GHOST GIRL 


“ You only fired once? ” 

Barton nodded. 

“ Your bullet,” said Jeffrey, “ carried away a 
corner of the mirror support and buried itself in 
the plaster in the wall. Irene’s revolver wouldn’t 
have had penetration enough to do that, if the bul- 
let had entered her body first. And sitting where 
she was, she couldn’t have intercepted it.” 

“ How do you know that was the revolver I 
fired?” said Barton. 

“ Because you carried it away with you,” said 
Jeffrey. “ You had it in your hand when you fright- 
ened the servant in the hall and it was in your pocket 
when your wife found it. Besides, if you’d shot 
her with an automatic 38, the bullet would have left 
its marks somewhere else.” 

Jeffrey gave that a minute to sink in and then he 
went on again. 

“ Why was it that Irene appeared that first night 
when you were in the room? You know the reason. 
She was afraid of Crow. She wanted a hold on 
Crow that your knowledge of the game would give 
her. She wanted two people to play off against 
each other and you and Crow served her purpose. 
She couldn’t have feared Crow without reason and 
she wouldn’t have taken you into the game, unless 
she had feared him. But in spite of her fear, she 
played the game recklessly. 

“ Evidently she thought that night, that she had it 
260 


A QUESTION OF CENTIMETERS 

in her own hands. Otherwise she wouldn’t have 
tried to trap you. When you fired at her, you 
missed. She was quick-witted enough to do the one 
thing that would keep you from firing again — pre- 
tend that she was hit. The fact that she was 
already made up white to look like a ghost, made 
the trick easier to play. But she might have played 
it better. She acted like an opera tenor — made 
the conventional gesture — clapped her left hand 
to her breast, in spite of the fact that it was her 
right side that was exposed to you. 

“ But the trick worked. You weren’t in a con- 
dition to think about details. You couldn’t get out 
the door you had come in by, because Crow was 
holding it on the other side. 

‘‘ Now what happened after you had gone out? 
Crow came in. You had played straight into his 
hands. He must have wanted desperately to get 
her out of the way. When would he have a better 
opportunity to do it than just after you left, thinking 
you had killed her yourself? Your revolver was 
lying on the chiffonier. But I don’t think he no- 
ticed it. If he had, he’d probably have killed her 
with it, instead of with his own.” 

“ How do you know he didn’t kill her with it? ” 
I asked. “ Assuming that you are right about 
everything else, how can you be sure of that? ” 

Why,” said Jeffrey, “ I have taken the trouble 
to read the full report of the inquest — a thing that 
261 


THE GHOST GIRL 


even Barton apparently has neglected to do. The 
bullet was found in the body and it was a thirty- 
four.” 

He turned back to Barton. “ I suppose you’d 
had enough of the crime without reading about it,” 
he said. “ I dare say I’d have felt that way my- 
self. But, if anything is true in the world. Barton, 
it’s that the man who killed Irene Fournier was the 
man who followed you up that passage, intending 
to kill you, and if that man was Crow, then Crow 
was the murderer.” 

There was a silence after that. Gwendolen 
broke it. “ He must have killed her without giving 
her time to finish dressing, because the bodice itself 
wasn’t penetrated by the bullet. He must have 
dressed her himself afterward. Why do you sup- 
pose he did that? ” 

“ I imagine,” said Jeffrey, “ that for some reason, 
a good deal hung on that last appearance Irene 
meant to make. She told Barton, here, you remem- 
ber, that the game would be played that night — 
finished. She probably meant to play it her way — 
refused to play it Crow’s. Somehow or other, I 
imagine that her body, dead and cold and white, 
clad in its satin gown, was used once more to ter- 
rorize Crow’s victim. And then — this is pure 
guesswork, you know — after he had carried her 
back and laid her on the bed in the hidden room, 
waiting for the dark of another night to finish his 
262 


A QUESTION OF CENTIMETERS 

work and hide the traces of it, he started out for a 
walk — perhaps just at dawn. And he found Bar- 
ton there unconscious. 

“ How he got him into the house, I don’t know. 
He’s strong enough, I think, to have carried him in 
bodily. Or, whether he roused him and walked in 
and then drugged him into a deeper unconsciousness 
afterward, I don’t know. However he did it, that 
one discovery gave him his chance. 

“ Whatever happened, he would be fortified by 
the irresistible presumption in Barton’s mind that 
Barton himself was the murderer.” 

“ I can hardly believe it yet,” said Barton. “ I 
can see her still, just as she looked there on the 
floor. She looked like death. And why . . .” 

He stopped there and seemed to be wrestling with 
a question he found it hard to ask. Finally he got 
it out. “If I didn’t kill her, then what has sKe 
got against me now? Why did she appear to me 
to-night in the house?” 

There was something in the simple, almost child- 
like way in which he asked the question, that em- 
barrassed us a little. Me, anyway, and I think Jeff- 
rey, too, for he changed the subject rather abruptly. 

“Why did you go back there. Barton? You 
said you wanted to get the goods on Crow.” 

“ I don’t know just what I wanted,” he said. “ I 
knew he had some papers that he kept locked up 
pretty carefully in a steel uniform case. I took a 
263 


THE GHOST GIRL 


wax impression of the lock the last day I was there. 
I didn’t know what he had, but I felt pretty sure 
there was something. I made the key at home 
when I hadn’t anything better to do. I made sure 
there was no one in the house to-night. Miss Mere- 
dith and her companion had gone back. I found 
that out at Oldborough. And they said Crow 
hadn’t been down for some time. I knew the care- 
taker slept in the gardener’s cottage, so I thought 
it a good chance to go and see what my key would 
unlock.” 

“ Well, you’re rather a reckless burglar, I think,” 
said Jeffrey, “ lighting up Crow’s wing of the house 
under those conditions.” 

“ I didn’t,” said Barton. “ I used a pocket 
torch.” 

“ Weren’t you rather startled,” asked Jeffrey, 
“ when you heard the automobile driving in? ” 

“ I didn’t,” said Barton. “ An automobile 
passed me on the way out to Beech Hill. None 
came into the grounds while I was there.” 

I could see from Jeffrey’s face that he was puz- 
zled, and the quality of his voice showed it, too, 
when he asked the next question. 

“What did you do? Tell us exactly what you 
did?” 

“ Forced a window on the first floor and got in,” 
said Barton. “ Went down the corridor and let my- 
self into the east wing of the house. That was 
264 


A QUESTION OF CENTIMETERS 

Crow’s and he always kept it locked. I found his 
box and went to work. My key needed a bit of re- 
touching before I could get it open. 

‘‘ On top of the things in the box was a photo- 
graphic plate wrapped up in paper. I shone my 
torch through it and it looked like a photograph of 
Irene. I didn’t want that, so I put it aside and 
began picking at the papers.” 

“A photographic plate?” said Jeffrey. “Not 
a photograph?” 

“ No, a plate. I let my torch shine through it. 
She was dressed in white satin, like in the portrait.” 

“ What did you do with it? ” Jeffrey asked. 

“ I don’t know,” he said. “ I don’t know much 
that happened after that, because just then I heard 
the creak of a door and saw a light and jumped up. 
I thought someone was coming. I tell you I was 
ready for that. I shouldn’t have made a fool of 
myself for Crow or anyone else. I knew just where 
I meant to go — how I meant to get away. But 
then I looked up and saw her.” 

His face was white now — white as it had been 
when he came bursting in upon us in the long room 
when the lightning showed him to us. His voice 
had fallen to a whisper. 

“ It was Irene herself come back. She stood 
there holding a candle, shading it from her eyes 
with her hand. But I saw her face staring at me 
— wide-eyed — frightened like, out of the dark.” 

18 265 


THE GHOST GIRL 

“Dressed in white?’* asked Jeffrey steadily. 
He was the only one of us who could manage his 
voice like that. “ Dressed in white as you had 
always seen her — and with her hair done the same 
way? ” 

Barton shook his head. “ I don’t know. I don’t 
think so. I didn’t see any white. Just her face and 
the hand that shaded the candle. She made a little 
noise in her throat and at that I began running. I 
don’t know where I went. I got lost in the pas- 
sages. And when the lightning showed where I was, 
I was in the room where I had killed her.” 

There was another silence, broken at last by Jeff- 
rey and the strangeness of what he said, fairly made 
me gasp. 

“ A photographic plate,” he said thoughtfully. 
His narrowed eyes were looking out at nothing in 
the intensity of his concentration. To Barton’s 
terrifying vision, he wasn’t apparently giving a 
thought. “ I’d like to see that. I wish you had it 
here.” 

At that moment there came a thundering knock 
at the door and without waiting for an invitation 
to enter, Richards burst in upon us. The open door 
hid the bed and for a moment he didn’t see Barton. 
But the sight of Jeffrey seemed to be enough to 
finish him. 

“ Well,” he said grimly, “ you aren’t the man I’m 
looking for, but I guess you’ll do. You’ve butted in 
266 


A QUESTION OF CENTIMETERS 

on the Police just once too often. And running off 
with an automobile is no joke. Put on your coat 
and come along. I’d have got my man if it hadn’t 
been for . . .” 

He had got a little farther into the room by then 
and he caught his first glimpse of the rest of us, in- 
cluding Gwendolen. She was in negligee, rather, 
— she’s very pretty that way — and it was the sight 
of her really that prevented him from noticing Bar- 
ton on the bed, for he stopped short and caught his 
breath and backed up a little. 

‘‘ Excuse me ! ” he said. 

“ Oh, that’s all right,” said Gwendolen. 
“ We’re very glad you’ve come.” 

“We are, indeed,” Jeffrey corroborated politely. 
“ As for our butting in, you’d never have got your 
man, Richards, unless perhaps out of the river a 
couple of weeks from now. Somebody else would 
have got him first. We saved him for you. We’re 
glad you’ve come to claim him, for we didn’t know 
quite what to do with him.” 

As he concluded he nodded toward the bed 
where Barton lay. Richards looked and gasped. 
“ Where did you find him? ” he demanded. 

Instead of answering, Jeffrey spoke to Barton. 
“ Jail’s the safest place for you until we get through 
with this business. Go along with Richards. Keep 
your head and don’t worry. I’ll let you know how 
things come out.” 


267 


THE GHOST GIRL 


“ I suppose, according to your theory, he doesn’t 
even know what he’s wanted for,” said Richards. 
The sight of Barton had restored his good humor 
immediately. 

“ On the contrary,” Jeffrey answered coolly, “ he’s 
•been under the impression all along, that he had 
killed Irene Fournier himself. He has told us all 
about it. I’ve just been trying to convince him that 
he was mistaken.” 

“ Mistaken ! ” Richards roared, and then stood 
staring, speechless. “ I’ve seen some nuts in my day, 
but you’re the prize. I’ve got to hand it to you. 
‘ Convince him that he’s mistaken 1 ’ ” 

He stepped out into the corridor and nodded to 
two detectives who were waiting there. “ Come 
in,” he said. “ I’ve got Barton.” 

Barton seemed to agree with Jeffrey that jail would 
be the best place for him, though I doubt if he was 
much better convinced of his mistake than Richards 
himself. He got up stiffly and I picked up his coat 
to help him into it. As I did so, I noticed some- 
thing in one of the side pockets. 

‘‘ Barton,” said I, “ isn’t that the plate? ” 

He pulled it out and looked at it. It was a flat, 
heavy, oblong object wrapped in tissue paper. 

“ I must have put it in my pocket without know- 
ing,” he said, and handed it over to Jeffrey. 

“Here!” said Richards. “You can’t do that.” 

“ Send Barton along with your men and wait a 
268 


A QUESTION OF CENTIMETERS 

minute,” said Jeffrey. From the quiet authority of 
his tone, he might have been a police commissioner. 
Richards hesitated an instant, then gave a confirm- 
atory nod to his men. Barton went out quietly 
between them. 

“Well?” demanded Richards, as I closed the 
door behind them. 

“ Just a minute,” Jeffrey repeated. 

He tore the paper off the plate and stared at it 
rather blankly. There was Claire Meredith in her 
white satin gown, posed just as she had been in the 
portrait. 

“ That French photographer must have sent him 
the plate as well as the print,” I commented. “ I 
wonder why he did that.” 

Jeffrey pulled a little steel measuring tape out of 
his pocket and began, very carefully, measuring the 
plate. Richards shifted his feet uneasily. Jeffrey’s 
“ nonsense ” always worried him. But by the look 
in my friend’s face, there was no nonsense about this. 

He shut up the tape absently and put it in his 
pocket, then went on staring at the negative. He 
was holding it slantwise now so that the light re- 
flected, instead of shining through. I shall never 
forget the expressions that crossed his face. Doubt 
at first and then surmise, and then a sort of wide- 
eyed, incredulous certainty. The rest of us were 
hardly breathing, and at last even Richards was 
gazing at him in involuntary fascination. 

269 


THE GHOST GIRL 


“ It’s not a French plate,” he said at last, more 
to himself than to the rest of us. “ It measures in 
inches, not in centimeters.” 

Richards uttered a grunt of disgust. “ Is that 
all you’ve kept me waiting for? What does it mat- 
ter whether it measures in yards or in quarts?” 

“ It’s not all,” said Jeffrey, and his voice rang 
like a bell. “ It’s not all, but it’s enough ! ” 

“ It’s a photograph of Irene, isn’t it? ” asked 
Richards. 

“Yes. It’s a photograph of Irene Fournier.” 

Then he caught his breath. “ But we’ve got to 
be quick,” he said. 

He laid down the plate and began struggling 
into his overcoat. “ You’ll come with us? ” he said 
to Richards. It was meant for a question, but the 
urgency of it made it sound more like an order. 

“Where to?” 

“ To Beech Hill. You’ve got a motor boat. 
We can go in that. It’s shorter by river than it 
is by road.” 

“ What do you want to go there for? There’s 
no one there but Doctor Crow and he’ll most likely 
have gone back to bed by this time. And how do 
you know I’ve got a motor boat?” 

“ There is someone there besides Crow,” said 
Jeffrey. “ Somebody who won’t be there very much 
longer.” 

Then he turned to Jack. “ Get out your car as 
270 


A QUESTION OF CENTIMETERS 

quickly as you can. Take Gwendolen with you. 
Drive to Beech Hill, wide open. We’ll be there 
ahead of you because the river way’s shorter. But 
if, through any accident we aren’t, get into the 
house. Don’t mind if no one answers. Make all 
the row you can. And get in! It’s a life and 
death case. Jack.” 

Richards was still hesitating. “ I don’t know 
why in thunder I should go off on a wild goose chase 
at half-past five in the morning, just because a pic- 
ture of Irene Fournier measures inches instead 

of . . .” 

“ Richards,” said Jeffrey, “ did I ever tell you a 
thing was a fact when it wasn’t? Have I ever 
started you on a wild goose chase? I tell you now 
that Doctor Crow isn’t alone at Beech Hill, or 
wasn’t two hours ago. He will be before very long. 
And it’s a matter of life and death that we get 
there first.” 

“ All right,” said Richards. “ Come along. 
But I’d like to know how you knew I had a motor 
boat.” 


CHAPTER XIX 

WHAT WE SAW IN THE CAVE 

O UTSIDE the hotel, we met a leather-clad 
man who looked something like a chauffeur. 
He touched his flat cap to Richards. “ I hope 
you got the man who stole the automobile, Lieuten- 
ant,” he said. 

Jeffrey laughed. “ Surely he got him,” he said. 
“ Did you ever know the Lieutenant to fail? ” 

“ Back to the boat, Kelly,” said Richards. 
“ We’ve got another job to-night. Up the river 
again.” 

“ He’s the runner of the police boat,” the 
Lieutenant explained to me as we went pelting down 
a steep cobble-paved street in pursuit of Jeffrey and 
the engineer. We ran and stumbled and slipped 
along in the dark for a while without a word. But 
presently Richards spoke to me. 

“ Do you know how he knew I had a motor- 
boat? ” he asked. 

“ Why,” I panted, “ he knew that Barton was 
at Beech Hill and that you were watching Barton. 
We’d run off with the automobile and I suppose he 
figured that the only way you could have got back 
so soon would be in a motor-boat. We hadn’t been 
272 


WHAT WE SAW IN THE CAVE 

back very long, when you turned up and we must 
have got a pretty good start of you.” 

“ It Isn’t his running off with the car that makes 
me sore,” confided Richards, “ though I’ll admit 
I was mad enough when my shore party came down 
to the river and told me the man I was looking for 
had gotten away and taken our automobile with 
him. The thing that gets my goat Is that Jeffrey 
should have hung out a bluff that I was all wrong 
in suspecting Barton and that the real game was 
somewhere else altogether, and all the while he was 
tracking Barton himself on his own hook, just to 
carry him off under my nose. If he’d said ‘ I want 
Barton, too. I’ll take my way to find him and you 
take yours.’ That would have been on the level.” 

“ But,” I exclaimed, “ Jeffrey wasn’t . . .” 

And then I stopped short. It had been on the tip 
of my tongue to tell him that our getting hold of 
Barton was the purest accident and that Jeffrey 
had been perfectly sincere in saying he was' after 
other game. But the reflection that I was talking 
to a lieutenant of the police and that a full account 
of what we were doing would have involved a con- 
fession that we had committed a crime ourselves that 
night, checked me up rather sharply. I had fol- 
lowed Jeffrey’s advice a little too well In forgetting 
that I was a housebreaker. 

Luckily the darkness and the unevenness of the 
pavement gave me a plausible excuse for choking 

273 


THE GHOST GIRL 


off my narrative. Another minute and we were 
down on the boat landing. In the dim glimmer of 
the boat’s lights, I could see that Jeffrey and Kelly, 
the engineer, had already got aboard and cast off. 
Jeffrey was holding on to the landing with a boat 
hook and adjuring us to hurry. 

Richards and I tumbled in astern. Jeffrey seated 
himself in the bow beside Kelly and with a rush and 
a roar, we were off. 

The boat was a long, narrow, business-like look- 
ing craft, her four cylinders under the hood up for- 
ward and her fine tapering lines and her torpedo 
stern, evidently built for speed. 

It was brighter on the river than it had been in 
the narrow streets of the town, for the dawn was 
already paling to gray through the clouds over in 
the east and the surface of the river reflected the 
color still more coldly. The banks were perfect- 
ly black and forbidding. We were all warmly 
clad, and we needed the warmth badly. In spite 
of our great coats, the chill struck home to all of 
us. 

Perhaps it wasn’t only the cold that made us 
shiver and set our teeth to chattering. 

I couldn’t get Barton’s story out of my head. 
Why his story of the apparition he had seen there 
when he was rummaging amid Crow’s papers had 
made so little apparent impression on Jeffrey, I 
didn’t know. I think I am about the last man to 
274 


WHAT WE SAW IN THE CAVE 

i 

1 

! believe in ghosts myself. But this was the second 
j ghost story I had heard myself in connection with 
i this affair — the other, you remember, was the ap- 
I parition that had appeared to Jeffrey on the bridge 
1 in Paris — and both of them had a terrifying sound 
\ of reality to them. 

I To get away from that morbid train of thought, 
f I forced my mind to attempt a solution of Jeffrey’s 
f latest enigma. What was the enormous significance 
! that he saw in the dimensions of that photographic 
plate? Crow had said, I remembered, that Claire 
had her photograph taken in Paris by a French 
I photographer. Evidently that wasn’t true, or it 
wouldn’t have been taken on an American plate. 
An American photographer might use a French 
plate well enough, but the other way about — never. 
But what did it mean? Not necessarily that Crow 
had lied. He might conceivably have been misin- 
formed. 

Puzzle as I might, I couldn’t get any clue to that 
; wide-eyed look — incredulous, yet certain — that I 
had seen in Jeffrey’s face, nor to the urgency of the 
haste with which he had started us back to Beech 
Hill. The urgency wasn’t abated either. 

Jeffrey was standing beside the wheel, peering out 
ahead through the thinning dark, every line of his 
tense body a mute appeal to the engineer to drive the 
boat for all she was worth. We were doing pretty 
well, too, as the big wave that curled and broke 
275 


THE GHOST GIRL 


around our bows attested. ‘‘ She had a bone in her 
teeth,” as the sailors say, that trip. 

The Beech Hill estate, as I have said, is a penin- 
sula with a blunt, broad head and a very narrow 
neck. The general direction of the river is, of 
course, southward. Just above Beech Hill it nar- 
rows between high precipitous banks. But below, 
while the east bank holds high and rigid with a ram- 
part of undulating hills, the west bank falls away 
into a hollow. The river meets the situation by 
branching; one branch curving around north and 
even northeast, and shading off into a marsh, then 
circling widely southwest and southeast, until it joins 
the main stream again, so the large area southwest 
from Beech Hill would be a lake, if it were not that 
a low hill rising in the middle of It, made an Island. 
Jt was this island and the marsh that forced the 
road north from Oldborough Into a wide detour 
westward that made the river route, as Jeffrey had 
pointed out, much the shortest. And, If one com- 
manded a high-power motor-boat, much the quick- 
est way of getting from Oldborough to Beech 
Hill. 

Already the river was widening, and presently 
we made out through the dark, the blunt end of the 
island — Hoag Island, I think Is the local name of 
it — projecting out into the middle of it. 

Jeffrey came aft and joined Richards and me. 
“ Of course, the nearest way,” he said, “ is to the 
276 


WHAT WE SAW IN THE CAVE 

right, up the main channel. If time weren’t such a 
factor, I d take the other. The house commands a 
^ pretty good view of this channel and what with the 
daylight and the noise we’re making, he’ll have 
warning that we’re coming a good while before we 
get there.” 

“Who’ll have warning?” said Richards. 

“ Crow,” said Jeffrey. 

“ Crow ! ” Richards exclaimed. “ I thought you 
wanted to warn Crow?” 

Jeffrey didn’t answer that question. “ You saw 
Crow yourself? ” he asked. 

“ Sure,” said Richards. 

“ What was he doing? ” 

“ Just what any man would be doing whose house 
had just been broken into by a burglar. He’d got 
up and dressed and was out looking for him with a 
gun. I met him when I came ashore after I heard 
the shot fired. He didn’t seem particularly glad to 
see me, but he acted sore enough when my other 
men came up, and said that the fellow we were after 
had evidently got away and taken our automobile 
with him.” 

“ He wasn’t very keen on the capture, it seems to 
me,” said Jeffrey. “ He didn’t offer you his own 
I car to go back to Oldborough in, did he? You 
might have caught him with that. That little tin- 
pot you rented at the garage couldn’t go very 
fast.” 


277 


THE GHOST GIRL 

“ He probably didn’t have any automobile there,” 
said Richards. 

“ Oh, yes, he had,” said Jeffrey. “ He certainly 
had the one he came out from town in last night.” 

“ Probably never thought of it,” said Richards. 

No,” said Jeffrey, “ I believe that’s true. He’d 
have offered it, if he thought of it. By the way, 
didn’t you offer to leave him one or two of your men 
to guard the place? You couldn’t be sure, of 
course, that the marauder had got away.” 

“ Yes, I did,” said Richards, “ but he thought it 
wouldn’t be necessary. He said he’d go down and 
lock the park gates.” 

‘‘ ‘ Lock the park gates,’ ” said Jeffrey. “ I don’t 
like that. That’s something I hadn’t thought of.” 

“ It’s certainly the natural thing to do,” said 
Richards. “ Well, he said he and the caretaker 
would be enough to protect the place and he 
wouldn’t need our help. He said to let him know 
if we got Barton.” 

“ Did you see the caretaker? ” Jeffrey asked. 

Richards shook his head. “ Come to think of it, 
I didn’t.” 

“ It’s queer,” said Jeffrey, “ that the noise and 
the confusion and the shooting didn’t rouse him, 
too.” 

“ Oh, I don’t know,” said Richards, “ some peo- 
ple sleep like the dead. But it’s queer that Crow 
didn’t arouse him himself.” 

278 


WHAT WE SAW IN THE CAVE 

Just then Kelly called back to us from the wheel. 

There’s something wrong with the dope,” he said. 
** We’re missing fire right along.” 

I hadn’t noticed it before, but it was obviously 
true. The river was still rushing by fast enough, 
but the current was doing most of that. When I 
sighted a tree on the bank for a landmark, I saw 
that we weren’t much more than keeping abreast of 
it. 

“Take the wheel a minute,” said Kelly. 

Jeffrey was at his side in a minute and began 
steering the boat out to the left where the current 
W’asn’t so swift. 

Kelly came aft and opened up the gasoline tank, 
then his face went blank. The tank was almost 
empty. “ I knew we had to fill up again at Old- 
borough,” he said contritely, “ but I forgot it.” 

“ Can’t you possibly nurse her along to the Beech 
Hill landing? ” Jeffrey asked. 

Kelly shook his head. “ There isn’t another half 
mile in her,” he said. 

Jeffrey threw the wheel over a little farther and 
we moved still further out to the left. We were 
headed straight for the island now. 

“ Turn around and go back,” said Richards. 
“ The current will take us back to Oldborough all 
right.” 

“ Put Drew and me ashore here on the island first. 
I’ve got a revolver, but Drew hasn’t. Give him 

279 


THE GHOST GIRL 


yours. Then go back to Oldborough as best you 
can and fill up with gasoline. When you’ve got it, 
come back a-pelting.” 

Richards hesitated, but Jeffrey was still at the 
wheel and heading straight for the marshy bank of 
the island. “ I haven’t time to explain,” he said. 
“ I can only give you my word that I’m asking you 
to do what you would do in a minute, if you knew 
the facts. But whether you come back or not, 
Drew and I get off here.” 

“ All right,” said Richards, “ I’ll come back,” and 
he handed me his revolver. 

He had hardly said it, when our boat pushed 
softly into the mud and stopped. There was still 
an uninviting looking stretch of mud and water be- 
tween us and the hard bank. 

“ Overboard, Drew,” said Jeffrey, and suiting 
the action to the word, he vaulted over the side and 
started wading in the icy water towards shore. 

I wasn’t but a few seconds behind him, but I 
heeded Richards’s cry and stopped long enough to 
push the boat out of the mud, then I splashed ashore 
after Jeffrey. 

In June, when everything is in full leaf, I suppose 
Hog Island may be an attractive spot, in spite of its 
name. Any place is beautiful in such conditions. 
But on that cold March morning, bleak, wet, the 
branches on its stunted trees and undergrowth 
rattling in the rising wind; the dark of its shadows 
280 


WHAT WE SAW IN THE CAVE 

betraying us after the brightness of the river had 
given a promise of day, so that we stumbled in our 
breathless haste over fallen logs and blundered into 
mudholes, it was about the most dismal place I had 
ever found myself in. 

Jeffrey set the pace and it needed about all my 
energy to keep up with him. “ If I’m aimed right,” 
he said, as I came panting alongside, “we’ll come 
out just opposite the boathouse.” 

“ How are we going to get across? ” I asked. 

“ Swim, I suppose,” said Jeffrey. “ I wish there 
were a quicker way.” 

Personally I wished there might be a more com- 
fortable way. My one plunge, thigh deep, in the icy 
water had given me small relish for the prospect of 
swimming in it. 

But it gave me, more than anything that had gone 
before, a realization of how seriously Jeffrey 
meant that our getting to Beech Hill in time was 
a matter of life and death. Jeffrey didn’t like to 
swim any better than a cat. It was one of the 
few athletic sports at which I excelled him. Mat- 
ters were urgent, indeed, when he talked of swim- 
ming. 

For the present, though, we had to climb. ‘A 
long irregular hog back divides the island along its 
major axis — a fact which was probably accountable 
for its name. We were scrambling up now, clutch- 
ing at bushes when the treacherous clay underfoot 
19 281 


THE GHOST GIRL 


slipped away beneath us. Here and there a half 
imbedded rock added to our discomfort. 

“ We’re nearly up,” commented Jeffrey presently, 
“ and we may see something from the top. Any- 
how, we’ll find out if our direction’s right.” 

On hands and knees, we gained the crest of the 
ridge and there paused a moment — not for breath, 
badly as we needed it — but to give Jeffrey a chance 
to squint through the trees and try to discover if we 
were headed in the right direction. 

Neither of us spoke and now that there was no 
crackling of branches or rustling of soggy leaves 
under foot, the silence settled down almost oppress- 
ively.” 

Suddenly I saw Jeffrey’s body grow tense. 
“ Hold your breath a second. Drew,” he said. I 
want to listen.” 

For perhaps five seconds neither of us breathed. 
I was listening, too, with all my ears, but I heard 
nothing. Presently Jeffrey gave a little nod and we 
started on again. Not straight down the hill now, 
but at an angle. 

It was easier to keep up with him now. For 
some reason, he wasn’t setting quite so fast a pace. 
Suddenly I stopped dead in my tracks. He looked 
around at me curiously. 

“ It’s nothing,” I whispered. “ I’m beginning 
to see things, that’s all. I hate this half light. I 
thought I saw something moving among the trees.” 

282 


WHAT WE SAW IN THE CAVE 

Jeffrey peered in the direction of my nod. “ Per- 
haps you did,” he said. “ One of the island’s 
namesakes, perhaps, rooting around for acorns.” 

“ It didn’t look like that,” I said. “ It didn’t 
look like anything it could be, Jeffrey,” I said. 

“ Come along, then,” he said. 

Neither of us had been paying attention to what 
was right under our feet and the result was that 
we both lost our footing on the slippery declivity of 
the hill and went down with a rush, trying to keep 
from falling. But presently I crashed through a 
dead limb, stumbled over a cobble-stone, and went 
down in a heap, with Jeffrey, little better off, 
beside me. 

Each of us started to say something at the same 
instant. But before we could speak, there came a 
sudden sound that froze us into silence — that ar- 
rested us, half on foot and half on the ground, as 
suddenly as if we had been turned to stone. 

What we heard was a terrified wailing cry in a 
woman’s voice. It didn’t seem far away — seemed 
right at hand, in fact. And yet it came from all 
around — came, if anywhere, from right behind us. 

For a while — a space of time that could have 
been measured in seconds, we stared at each other, 
each wondering if by any human possibility, the 
other could have heard what he did. Then Jeffrey 
bent forward a little in the preliminary effort to get 
to his feet. But instead of rising, he reached out 
283 


THE GHOST GIRL 


suddenly and caught my arm and pointed with it. 

There, in the wet clay, right at our feet, was the 
single print of a woman’s shoe. It was pointed 
toward us. 

Jeffrey straightened up and turned around and I 
followed him. “Look!” he said. 

A big rock was bedded In the hillside we had just 
come tumbling down. It projected out In a great 
ledge. And underneath It, shrinking back Into the 
dark of the little cave It formed, I saw . . . 

Well, Irene Fournier’s face. The face I had 
seen glowing with color on Jeffrey’s canvas — the 
face I had seen dozens of times in crude newspaper 
half-tones, as they had photographed her in the 
morgue — the face of the girl In the ice. It was 
as white now as It must have been then, with a kind 
of dreadful, bluish pallor and the golden hair, as 
It went back Into the shadows, was wildly disheveled 
and dripping wet. But the eyes shone there out of 
the dark, luminous, like those of a hunted animal. 
That was the face Barton had seen last night. 

I should have fled as Barton did, If the paralysis 
of nightmare hadn’t held me still. I’d have cried 
out with horror of the thing, but my throat was 
numb. For the girl was dead! Dead! And yet 
we saw her there. It was from those blue lips 
that that wailing cry had come. 

With an effort I got my eyes away from her and 
looked at Jeffrey. He looked a little limp and he 
284 


WHAT WE SAW IN THE CAVE 

was very pale. But what he said was : “ Thank 

God, we’re in time. I was afraid we’d be too 
late.” 

He didn’t say it to me, but to that dreadful appa- 
rition in the cave. 

“ You’re quite safe now,” he added, and then he 
moved gently toward her. 


CHAPTER XX 

THE WATCHERS AND THE WATCHED 

H e moved a little nearer still. “ You’re really 
quite safe now,” he said. “ We’re friends. 
Mr. Drew, here, is a lawyer from New York and 
I’m Arthur Jeffrey.” 

Already the terror had begun to go out of her 
eyes. At his name I thought I saw a little glint of 
recognition. 

“You’re Miss Meredith, aren’t you?” he asked. 
“ Miss Claire Meredith? ” 

She nodded dumbly. 

Jeffrey moved a little nearer. But seeing the way 
she shuddered, he stopped short. 

“ It isn’t — fear,” she said, forming the words 
stiffly and with difficulty. “ It’s cold. I’ve been in 
the river.” 

At that I shuddered, too. But not with cold. I 
was thinking of the other girl they had found in the 
river. Yes, the other girl! It must have been 
another after all. For this girl was alive and real 
— the blue pallor was disappearing from her white 
face. 

“In the river,” Jeffrey repeated. “You — fled 
into the river to get away from something? ” 

286 


THE WATCHERS AND THE WATCHED 

She nodded and her eyes widened a little. 

“WeVe had a touch of the river ourselves,” he 
said, “ and we haven’t a boat, but there’ll be one 
presently.” 

“ But why are you here?” she asked, “here on 
Hog Island of all deserted places in the world, and 
at this time on a March morning? ” 

“We were on our way to Beech Hill,” said Jeff- 
rey. “We were coming up the river in a motor- 
boat. The gasoline gave out, so we landed on the 
island and started across on foot. We were plan- 
ning to — swim the rest of the way.” 

“You were going to Beech Hill?” she asked, 
and now alarm lighted up in her eyes again. “ Are 
you friends of Doctor Crow’s?” Her voice died 
on the last words and she uttered them with a 
whisper. 

“ No,” said Jeffrey soberly, “ we were going 
there to try to save you from him. But I’m afraid 
we shouldn’t have been in time, if you hadn’t come 
to meet us.” 

She shivered again. “ No,” she said simply, 
“ you wouldn’t have been in time. But — but how 
did you know that I was in this country at all, or 
even alive? And how did you know I had to be 
saved from him?” 

“ It will take a long time to answer all those 
questions,” said Jeffrey. “ Just now there’s some- 
thing more profitable to do.” 

287 


THE GHOST GIRL 


She made a move as if to rise, but sank back 
again with a little twinge of pain. “ I’m afraid I 
can’t do much,” she said. 

Jeffrey went off a few paces and came back drag- 
ging the branching end of the limb I had crashed 
through on my way down hill. He placed it in 
front of the rock. “ I want your overcoat. Drew,” 
he said. And when I gave it to him, he threw it 
over the branch in a way that screened the cave en- 
trance fairly effectively. Then he took off his own 
coat — a big, fur-lined affair, and handed it to the 
girl. “ Take off some of your wet things,” he said, 
“ the more the better, then put on my overcoat. 
Drew and I are going to build a fire. The thing to 
do is to get you warm and comfortable, before the 
cold has time to strike in any further. You will 
find a flask in one of my pockets,” he added, “ with 
a little brandy in it. Most of it has already been 
drunk by the man you frightened out of his wits in 
the Beech Hill house to-night.” 

She made some demur about accepting our over- 
coats, but Jeffrey’s quiet authority didn’t allow any 
real resistance. 

“ We’re only wet part way up,” he said, “ and 
we’re going to get warm rustling firewood.” 

“ I hope,” she said, “ you won’t have to go very 
far away to get it.” 

“ We’ll stay within call all the time,” said Jeff- 
rey. 


288 


THE WATCHERS AND THE WATCHED 

Firewood wasn’t especially easy to find at that 
time of the year, and after last night’s rain. But 
we kicked open a couple of rotted stumps and got a 
quantity of dry punk out of the inside. Once 
alight, that sort of stuff would burn almost any- 
thing. 

We collected our fagots on the crest of a little 
hill just above the cave and we kept some sort of 
talk going all the while for the girl to hear. It 
wasn’t wonderful that she should not want to be left 
alone after what she had been through that night. 

Presently we heard her call. “ I’m ready now. 
Have you found anything at all in this soggy place 
that will burn? ” 

Her voice was entirely unlike the dead, colorless 
monotone she had spoken in before. Her recovery 
spoke wonders for her spirit and resiliency. 

Jeffrey has many accomplishments and perfec- 
tions, but I have one in which I excel him. I can 
build a fire. Perhaps his possession of so many ad- 
vantages makes it all the more remarkable that he 
'should recognize mine. He did anyway and sat 
down beside Claire — I have begun calling her that 
already — and watched in silence until my task was 
completed and a bright well-fed blaze was making 
us all more comfortable. 

It wasn’t until I had finished with the fire that I 
found leisure to look at her. When I did, I could 
have exclaimed aloud over the difference. The 
289 


THE GHOST GIRL 


pallor was gone from her cheeks, a faint flush of 
delicate color was coming into them. And her 
eyes ! It didn’t seem possible that those could be 
the same eyes that had stared at us in terror so short 
a while ago. As for her hair — her great, wonder- 
ful masses of hair — well, it was evident that Jeff- 
rey was looking at that, too. 

But Jeffrey, with all his temperament, and his 
intuitions and the rest of his artistic equipment, has 
a disconcerting way of being exceedingly practical 
when you least expect it. 

You ought to take that down,” he said, “ and 
give it a chance to dry while we’re here in front of 
the fire. Don’t braid it or anything. Just shake 
it out loose around your shoulders.” 

“ It’s dreadfully in the way like that,” she said, 
“ when I’m sitting down. There isn’t room for it.” 

And that, when she tried to follow his suggestion, 
proved true. It reached nearly to her knees when 
she stood erect. 

“ Now,” she said, when she had spread it out 
as well as she could, “ now may I ask a question 
again? How did you know that I was at Beech 
Hill and that I needed saving? ” 

“ Barton saw you there last night. He thought 
that what he saw was the ghost of a woman we 
knew to be dead. A woman he thought he had 
murdered. She looked very like you, in some ways, 
almost miraculously like.” 

290 


THE WATCHERS AND THE WATCHED 

“Was it Irene Fournier?” she asked. 

Yes, he said. ** Irene Fournier. Do you 
know who she was? Had you ever seen her? ” 

“ I only saw her once,” she said, “ but I’ve heard 
of her. I think,” she added after a little silence, 
“ I think that she was my half-sister.” 

Jeffrey’s eyes widened at that. 

“ I don’t know very much about it,” she said. 
“ My father must have been a painter. Was he? ” 
She turned to Jeffrey. “ Do you know?” 

He nodded. 

“ He fell in love, I think, with a peasant girl 
down in Normandy.” 

Jeffrey nodded again. 

“ I don’t mean my mother,” Claire said with a 
little hesitation, “ I mean her sister. I think he 
meant to marry her, but he was called away and 
when he came back she was dead. So then he mar- 
ried my mother. But I think Irene was his daugh- 
ter, too. 

“ I’m not sure whether he knew about her 
when he married my mother or not. But I know 
that afterward he settled some money on her. 
She spoke in a strange, guarded sort of way, almost 
hostile, the time I talked with her. It was strange 
to see her. She looked so like me — so almost 
exactly like me. 

“ But my — guardian took me away presently and 
asked her to come and see him. I wasn’t there 
291 


THE GHOST GIRL 


then and she wouldn’t tell him anything — anything 
that we wanted to know, except for a great deal of 
money. He didn’t believe that she was telling the 
truth, so he wouldn’t pay her and she went away.” 

“Did you tell her who you were?” Jeffrey 
asked. 

“ I didn’t know,” the girl said quietly. “ That’s 
what we were trying to find out. We spent years 
trying.” 

Suddenly Jeffrey caught his breath and his eyes 
lighted up. “ Was your guardian an English doctor 
named Williamson?” he asked. 

And at that she stared at him half frightened. 
“How did you know?” she whispered. “How 
did you know that? ” 

“ Two winters ago,” said Jeffrey, “ I had a 
studio over in Paris in the same court with Doctor 
Williamson and his wife and daughter. Some 
things that happened there, with what you just said, 
helped me to guess.” 

“ I wish you might have helped me to guess, 
then,” said the girl. “ We were badly in need of 
help of that sort.” 

“ I wish I might. If only I’d had a little more 
of the courage of my convictions that winter, I 
might have solved some of my own mysteries and 
yours, too. But let’s go back to the beginning. 
The story was that you had died of small-pox in 
Paris. Did you have small-pox, really? ” 

292 


THE WATCHERS AND THE WATCHED 

He might well ask, for her skin had the velvety 
bloom that rarely lasts after childhood. 

“ Yes,’’ she answered, “ or at least so they told 
me. But not in Paris. My Aunt and I had been 
spending the winter in one of the small towns of 
the Midi. There was a frightful epidemic of it 
there and about half the town died of it. I got well 
of small-pox, but when I was ready to leave the hos- 
pital and they asked me whom they should notify 
to come and get me, I couldn’t tell them. I asked 
them what my own name was and they rummaged 
through a big book and decided my name must be 
Celeste Biroux. And a terribly tired doctor said I 
was suffering from aphasia and ought to be looked 
after.” 

But you must have known you weren’t a French 
girl ! ” I exclaimed. 

“ It’s funny,” she said, “ but I didn’t find that out 
for a long time. You see I didn’t know the name 
of anything.” 

“ But surely,” I cried, “ they didn’t turn you out 
on the world like that.” 

“ There was nothing else they could do. If you 
could have seen that town! I stayed on for a 
while and helped nurse the others, partly because I 
was needed, but partly in the hope that whatever 
friends I had would come and claim me. But then 
I made up my mind that my friends, whoever they 
were, had probably been told that I had died. Died 
293 


THE GHOST GIRL 


and been buried the way they had to bury people 
during those horrible days. So there was nothing 
to wait for. 

“ They gave me a hundred francs and I went 
away, down to Nice, as it happened. That was all i 
I had in the world, except one or two good rings 
that I happened to be wearing when they took me 
to the pesthouse. Oh, and one or two other trink- 
ets that a doctor happened to remember were 
mine.” 

“ One of them,” said Jeffrey, thoughtfully, “ was 
a jade earring. An odd jade earring.” 

Once more she paled a little. The look in her 
face was almost one of fear. “ How can you know 
that?” she asked, “unless you know a great deal 
more.” 

“ I saw you once with it on,” he said. “ About 
this time of day and year. On the Pont Royale 
in Paris. You came and stood beside me. And 
then two gendarmes came and you went away. Do 
you remember? ” 

“ No,” she said. “ It wouldn’t have been — me, 
if I was there alone, at that hour. It would have 
been — the other.” 

“ Not Irene? ” I asked, puzzled. 

“ No. Not Irene.” She turned to Jeffrey. 

** You could see the earring. But how could you 
know that I had only one? ” 

It was to me that Jeffrey made his answer. 

294 


THE WATCHERS AND THE WATCHED 

“ Don’t you see, Drew, what it was that put us off 
the track? It never occurred to either of us that a 
pair of earrings could be split. We knew that 
Crow had one. We assumed that he had the pair. 
Just as I assumed that the girl I had seen on the 
bridge in Paris had been wearing a pair, because I 
saw she was wearing one.” 

He turned to Claire. “ I knew that unless it was 
a ghost girl I saw, that the report of your death 
was wrong. I thought from Crow’s having the ear- 
ring, that you had come to America and that he was 
in communication with you. And when they told 
me that a portrait I had painted of you from a 
photograph, was a picture of the girl who had been 
found in the ice, I believed that you had been mur- 
dered and that Doctor Crow was the murderer. I 
believed, absolutely, that you and Irene Fournier 
were the same person. I didn’t discover my mis- 
take until this morning.” 

“ Now,” said I, “ perhaps you’ll tell me how you 
discovered that from looking at the negative that 
Barton brought from Beech Hill in his pocket.” 

“ Why,” said Jeffrey, “ you must remember that 
I had never seen Irene Fournier nor a picture of 
her. The photograph I painted the portrait from 
was, of course, genuine. Crow got it from Paris, 
just as he said. But the portrait emphasized the 
real difference there was between the two faces. 
To counteract the effect of it. Crow posed Irene in 
295 


THE GHOST GIRL 


the dress and photographed her and pretended to 
Miss Meredith that it was the photograph I had 
returned. She thanked me for sending it to her the 
morning I talked with her. I thought then that it 
simply meant that Crow had a duplicate that he had 
given her to keep her from worrying. 

“ The minute I saw that plate, I knew it was a 
picture of a different person from the one Td 
painted. And I saw, too, that the thing had been 
retouched to make it look more like the authentic 
photograph. And then I knew that the ghost Bar- 
ton had seen in the Beech Hill House that night was 
no more a ghost than the one I had seen on the 
bridge in Paris. And I knew that if Miss Claire 
Meredith were alone at that house with Crow, she 
was in mortal danger. That’s a long explanation, 
Miss Meredith, but it’s the reason why we came in 
such a hurry and why we were so nearly too late.” 

I turned to Miss Meredith, too. “ It wasn’t very 
polite of me to insist on having my curiosity satis- 
fied right in the middle of your story. But I’d seen 
Jeffrey turn away after one look at that plate, and 
say that someone at Beech Hill was in danger and 
that there was life or death in our getting there 
quickly, and I’ve been puzzling over it ever since. 
I wish, though, if you aren’t too tired, that you’d 
go on and tell us the rest.” 

But the way she was looking at Jeffrey was an 
indication that I might have spared my apology. 

296 


THE WATCHERS AND THE WATCHED 

Lips a little parted, eyes that were starry in their 
deep brightness. Well, what girl wouldn’t look 
like that at a man who was telling such a story. It 
wasn’t until I asked her to go on with her own that 
she looked away. 

“ It’s nothing very exciting,” she began. “ I 
don’t believe I ever had any real adventure until 
last night. I went to Nice, as I said, and pawned 
my rings and then I sat down on the promenade and 
began to think about what I should do. A nice 
looking woman was sitting at the other end of my 
bench and I spoke to her, in French, of course. She 
said, in English, that she didn’t understand, and I 
began, quite naturally, talking to her in English. 
I told her I wanted to get a position as companion 
or governess or something, but that I hadn’t any 
references. That got me started telling her the 
whole story. 

“ It frightened her a little at first. It was so 
incredible that it seemed as if I must be trying to 
impose on her. But luckily her husband was a doc- 
tor and he came along just then and questioned me 
and they finally decided that I would do for their 
daughter. Of course none of us knew then that 
there was anything queer about me, except the fact 
that I couldn’t remember names. And by the time 
we did discover it — well, they had grown fond of 
me and sorry for me and wouldn’t hear of my living 
anywhere except with them.” 

20 297 


THE GHOST GIRL 

“ Can you tell us what it was that was ‘ queer ’ 
about you?’’ Jeffrey asked. 

“ Why, I used to have lapses of consciousness and 
wander off and do heaven knows what outlandish 
things. Doctor Williamson concluded that it was 
my former self that was doing them, the girl — be- 
fore the small-pox, you know. But as I couldn’t 
remember any of the things she had done when I 
came to, it didn’t help much toward finding out who 
she was. The only thing to do was to follow me 
around and see what I did and take care that I 
didn’t get into any serious trouble. They did that, 
those people, with a devotion . . .” 

Her voice choked up a little at that. “ Oh, I 
can’t talk about it,” she said and then went on. 
“ My lapses kept getting worse and longer, and all 
of us got very much discouraged, except the Doctor 
himself. He insisted that the worse they got, the 
nearer I was to being a normal person again. He 
said the longer and the stronger they were, the more 
likely it was that the memory would begin coming 
through. And by and by that really began to 
happen. 

“ There was a lot of argument in the family as to 
whether I was English or American. Mrs. Wil- 
liamson and Evelyn insisted I was English, but the 
Doctor thought I was American. I was perfectly 
sure that some of the places I began remembering 
intimately, couldn’t be anywhere but in America.” 

298 


THE WATCHERS AND THE WATCHED 

“ Why did you live in that particular part of 
Paris? ” Jeffrey asked. 

“ It was just a part of their kindness to me. I 
wanted to and they noticed that when I wandered 
off — in my old self, you know — I always went 
there. So they took an apartment in that court.” 

“ As a matter of fact,” Jeffrey asked, “ didn’t 
you and your aunt live there before you had the 
small-pox? ” 

The girl looked at him in simple astonishment. 
‘‘ Why, of course, rue Boissonade,” and she gave the 
number. “ I never put those two facts together 
until this instant, though I knew them both inde- 
pendently for quite a while. But — the William- 
sons didn’t have the same apartment that my aunt 
and I had lived in.” 

Jeffrey laughed. ” No,” he said. “ I had that 
one.” 

She colored vividly. ‘‘Did I — haunt you?” 
she asked. 

“ That’s exactly what you did,” said Jeffrey. “ I 
never saw you there, but you left some pretty puz- 
zling traces. Drew can tell you that story some- 
time. He’s a great yarn spinner. But please go 
on. Tell us the rest.” 

“ There isn’t much more to tell,” she said, “ about 
what happened over there. My memory kept com- 
ing back, stronger and stronger all the time, until 
at last I told them — the Williamsons, I mean — 
299 


THE GHOST GIRL 


that I was perfectly competent to look after myself 
now and that I meant to go to America and find 
out who I was. One of my discoveries about myself 
was that I could paint a little and I sold everything 
I painted at pretty good prices. So I wasn’t finan- 
cially dependent on the Williamsons, although, of 
course, I owed them a debt that money couldn’t 
repay at all. 

“ They hated to have me go, especially Mrs. 
Williamson and Evelyn and begged me to let the 
Meredith girl lie quiet in her grave down in the 
south of France. But I couldn’t. Fond as I am 
of them, there was a — well, a call of the blood, it 
seemed, that drew me.” 

“You’d remembered your name by that time?” 
said Jeffrey. “ But that wasn’t the name you went 
by.” 

“ No,” she said. “ I stuck to the hospital name 
for a while — Celeste Biroux — until that got to 
seeming ridiculous. And then, as the Williamsons 
wanted me to, I took their last name. They called 
me a cousin or something. And for my first name, 
I had my own — Claire. It was engraved on the 
inside of one of my rings.” 

“ Then,” pursued Jeffrey, “ it was as Miss Claire 
Williamson that you came to this country.” 

She nodded. 

“You came alone?” he asked. 

“ Of course. There wasn’t any earthly reason 
300 


THE WATCHERS AND THE WATCHED 

why I shouldn’t — or at least, there didn’t seem to 
be. I landed in New York yesterday. Yesterday! 
It seems years since then.” 

“ What did you do with your luggage? ” Jeffrey 
asked rather suddenly. 

She looked at him in frank amusement. “ You 
ask the oddest questions,” she said, “ but I did do 
something odd with it. I didn’t bring it through 
the customs. You see we landed just at five o’clock. 
I hadn’t sent any word to my aunt that I was com- 
ing. I couldn’t be sure that my handwriting would 
be the same or that she would remember it and I 
felt that her first thought on getting a letter from 
me would be that I was an impostor. I thought 
that if I could just walk in and speak to her, that 
that would be much simpler. I had set my heart, 
somehow, on doing it that night.” 

“You — hadn’t any enmity against her, then?” 
said Jeffrey. 

“ No,” she said in frank surprise. “ Why 
should I have? I am perfectly sure the hospital 
authorities told her I was dead. For anything I 
know, she may have had the disease herself.” 

In Jeffrey’s mind, I am sure, as well as in mine, 
was the thought of that pin-pricked photograph and 
a momentary speculation as to what would have 
happened if the girl had carried out her plan and 
walked in upon her aunt as she had intended. 

“ So, as soon as we got ashore,” she went on, “ I 
301 


THE GHOST GIRL 


walked straight through the customs’ barrier with 
nothing but my purse, jumped into a taxi and went 
to my aunt’s town house.” 

“ How could you be sure of finding her there? ” 
Jeffrey asked. j 

“ I knew she was still alive. I’d seen occasional ' 
references to her in the Paris Herald and I knew , 
she’d never move or do anything like that. So I 
went straight to the old address that I remembered. ! 
Of course I knew that there was a possibility that i 
she’d be at Beech Hill. When the taxi drove up 
to the house, there was another car standing there 
— a big, six cylinder runabout, and while I was pay- 
ing my driver. Doctor Crow opened the door and 
came out. I knew him at once, though I hadn’t 
seen him since I was ten or twelve years old and I 
might not have known him if I had seen him any- 
where else. But I called him by name without any 
hesitation. He knew me, too.” 

“ Yes,” said Jeffrey, “ I should think he would.” 

“ I see,” she said thoughtfully. “ Because of 
Irene, you mean.” 

We both nodded. 

“ He told me that my aunt was at Beech Hill 
and he was just starting for there himself. He 
wanted me to go straight up there with him. He 
said it wouldn’t take so very long in that high- 
powered car of his, and he could give me a fine spin. 

It didn’t seem such a wild thing to do, as he sug- 
302 


THE WATCHERS AND THE WATCHED 

gested it. Remember, he’s my cousin. We had 
known each other as children — or when I was a 
child, at least. So I said I’d go.” 

“ He asked you, didn’t he,” Jeffrey interrupted, 
“when you’d landed and what you’d done since?” 

She nodded. “ Naturally.” 

“And what you’d done with your luggage?” 

“ He asked that, too,” she said. 

“ You didn’t stop for any dinner,” said Jeffrey. 
“ You got out of town as fast as you could. But 
somewhere about nine o’clock, you stopped at a 
little village and left the car and went to a lunch 
wagon and got something to eat.” 

“ You couldn’t have deduced that from anything,” 
said the girl after a long look into his face. “ You 
must have seen that.” 

“ Exactly,” he said. “ Do you remember 
another car that was pulled up on the same cross 
street? We were in it. I caught just a glimpse 
of your face and of Crow’s as you turned the cor- 
ner. But — well. I’d have staked my word then 
that you were dead. I thought the fancied resem- 
blance of that girl’s face to Claire Meredith’s and 
of the man’s to Crow was just a trick of fancy. If 
Crow had been alone, I should have recognized 
him. You see,” he concluded soberly, “ my vanity 
of opinion might have cost you your life. I can’t 
see yet why it didn’t. Miss Meredith wasn’t at 
Beech Hill, was she? Crow had you all to him- 
303 


THE GHOST GIRL 


self there? He’d even got the caretaker out of the 
way. Why did he delay? Why didn’t he act 
quicker? ” 

“ What was the man’s name who broke in? ” she 
asked. 

‘‘ Barton. He’s one of the men who broke in,” 
said Jeffrey. 

“ I think that’s what saved my life — one of the 
things.” 

“ Wouldn’t you rather not talk about it now,” 
Jeffrey urged. “ We’re terribly interested, but 
we’re not inhuman really. Don’t you want to wait 
until some other day? ” 

She shook her head. “ I want to tell it now,” 
she said, “ and then perhaps not tell it again, ever. 

“ After we’d bought our sandwiches and started 
on again. Doctor Crow began telling me, for the 
first time, about my aunt’s mental condition. He 
said she had lucid periods and periods that weren’t 
lucid at all when it was dangerous for her to see peo- 
ple — impossible really for anyone to be with her, 
except himself. 

“ I felt a vague discomfort about my journey 
then — felt that if he’d been playing fair, he’d have 
told me that before we started. But it seemed 
foolish to insist on going back, so we went on. It 
wasn’t till we got inside the gates that he told me 
his plan. He said he’d take me up to his wing of 
the house and leave me there to make myself com- 
304 


THE WATCHERS AND THE WATCHED 

fortable and freshen up from the journey and per- 
haps have a cup of coffee or something, while he 
went and saw my aunt. Then, he said, if she was 
all right, he’d take me in to her. If not, I could 
wait until morning and see her then. She was more 
herself in the daytime, he said. 

“ I didn’t like that at all, but I assented to it. I 
thought, of course, there’d be servants there, pos- 
sibly some old ones who remembered me and that I 
could take matters more or less into my own hands. 

“ He drove me up in the car — not to the big 
door, but to one at the side, a wing that I didn’t re- 
member, though I remembered the rest of the 
house perfectly the moment I saw it. He let me in 
with a latchkey instead of ringing. There didn’t 
seem to be any servants anywhere. I spoke of that, 
but he laughed in a perfectly natural way and said 
that everybody went to bed with the chickens out 
here and I knew that was so. There was nothing I 
could do without making a scene and even that 
would probably not have done me any good, if his 
intentions were — sinister. And, of course, if they 
were all right, it would only make me look fool- 
ish. 

“ He showed me into a little dressing-room where 
I could freshen up after my long ride, and when I 
came out, he had a cup of hot coffee and some sand- 
wiches all ready for me. He said he didn’t want 
anything himself, but that he’d go and make his 

305 


THE GHOST GIRL 


regular evening visit to my aunt and that if she was 
all right, he’d come and get me. 

“ He was gone a long time, but at last I heard 
footsteps in one of the downstairs corridors. I 
thought he was coming back. But the next thing I 
heard I didn’t like. That was somebody letting 
himself into the study downstairs with a key. The 
grate of that key sounded unpleasant somehow, 
made me feel as if I had been a prisoner. I sup- 
posed, of course, it was he down there and I ex- 
pected every minute that he’d come up. But he 
didn’t come and at last I went to the head of the 
stairs and looked down. And then I saw that the 
room wasn’t lighted. Whoever was down there, 
was working in the dark. 

“ I don’t pretend that I wasn’t frightened, but 
after all, it only makes your fright worse to keep 
still and wonder what you’re frightened about, so I 
lighted a candle and went down. I saw a man 
down there that I knew wasn’t Doctor Crow, 
searching through some papers by the light of an 
electric torch. 

“ I was fairly in the room before I saw that, be- 
cause, of course, the light of my own candle was 
shining in my eyes. If I had seen it a little sooner, 
I shouldn’t have gone in. But he heard me and 
turned around and gave one look at me. It was 
the most horribly terrified look I ever saw in a man’s 
face. He made a little clicking noise in his throat 
306 


THE WATCHERS AND THE WATCHED 


and then turned and ran. He bolted through a 
door — a different door than the one he’d come in 
by and left unlocked behind him, and for quite a 
while I heard him running this way and that through 
the passages. 

“ I thought of calling out for help or something 
and then quite suddenly I decided not to and I de- 
cided, too, that I wouldn’t go back to the room 
where Doctor Crow had left me. I’d go over to 
the other part of the house — the part I knew, in 
the hope of finding somebody — somebody else than 
the Doctor. So I walked down the corridor the 
burglar had come in by and hunted around and 
found myself at last in a part of the house that I 
recognized. I wandered around for a while and 
then I made up my mind to go straight to my aunt’s 
sitting-room. If she were at Beech Hill at all even 
if she weren’t in a condition to see me herself, she’d 
surely have a maid, or nurse, or companion or some- 
body I could go to. 

“ I got a little confused in the passages, but 
finally I found my way there. The room was empty 
and somehow, it looked as if she weren’t using it 
any more. And when I went into her bedroom, 
that was empty, too. I had got back to the sitting- 
room, when a puff of wind from somewhere blew 
my candle out. I hadn’t a match and — well, I 
was about at the end of my resources, or I thought I 
was. I didn’t feel equal, anyway, to exploring that 

307 


THE GHOST GIRL 

horrible house any further in the dark — for I was 
beginning to have a horror of it. 

“ I just sat down on a couch in the corner and 
waited. It was storming then. The rain was roar- 
ing down furiously, so that I couldn’t hear anything 
else, till pretty soon I felt another puff of wind like 
the one that had blown out my candle, as if someone 
had opened a door somewhere. And then I saw 
that a man was standing in the room. I hadn’t 
heard him come in, but it seemed as if he had come 
out of the clothes-closet. 

“ I didn’t cry out. I don’t often do that. I 
suppose it was partly fright that held me perfectly 
still and almost kept me from breathing — like a 
nightmare, you know. 

“ He stood there for a minute, perfectly still, too, 
as of he didn’t know which way to go. And then 
there came a blinding blaze of lightning and I saw 
who it was. It was Doctor Crow. He had a re- 
volver in his hand. But that wasn’t the terrifying 
thing about him. It was the look in his face. If 
ever you could see murder in a man’s eyes, and in 
his horrible savage smile, it was in his face then. 

‘‘ As soon as the lightning flashed into the room, 
he began looking around — rather slowly and care- 
fully. But his eyes hadn’t got around to me, when 
the lightning went out and everything was black 
again — blacker of course to his eyes and mine than 
it had been before. He stood there waiting for the 
308 


THE WATCHERS AND THE WATCHED 

next flash. When it came, he would see me. I 
wanted to use the darkness to run away in, but I 
couldn’t move. I had to sit there. And then, be- 
fore another flash could come, we heard a shot out in 
the grounds somewhere and the sound of a man run- 
ning, plunging through the underbrush. At that he 
darted across the room and out of the door. 

“ I don’t know how long I sat there before I could 
get strength enough to stand up again. When I 
did, I felt my way out of the room and down the 
stairs and finally, following a little breeze that kept 
blowing in my face, I found a door that had been 
left unlatched and that let me out of doors. 

“ The rain had almost stopped by then, and I could 
hear a motor-boat throbbing along out in the river. 
I hurried down the drive as fast as I could. The one 
thing I wanted to do was to get away from Beech 
Hill — to put miles and miles between the dreadful 
place and me and then go and ask for shelter some- 
where. 

“ But long before I got to the park gates, I heard 
someone coming. I left the driveway and hid among 
the trees. The sky was getting brighter then and it 
was almost moonlight. Anyway, it was light enough 
for me to see who it was that was coming. It was 
Doctor Crow again. He was still carrying his 
revolver in his hand. 

“ I waited quite a while among the trees for him 
to get by and then I went on to the gates. I found 
309 


THE GHOST GIRL 


them locked and I knew I couldn’t possibly get over 
the wall. The only way out was the river. I knew 
that Doctor Crow would go back to the house and 
search it, and when he found I wasn’t there, he’d 
lock it up and begin searching the grounds. So I 
went down to the river and waded in as far as I 
could and then — well, I kept on. I am a pretty 
good swimmer, but I have never swum in heavy 
clothes before. But, really, I didn’t care much what 
happened — whether I ever felt land under my feet 
or not. I just wanted to get away from that hor- 
rible, horrible place. The current carried me along 
pretty well, and, presently, I found myself wading 
out again, here on Hog Island.” 

She had gone pretty white during the last part of 
the narrative. For myself, I felt guilty that we’d let 
her tell it, even though she had wanted to. 

Jeffrey reached over and laid a steadying hand on 
her shoulder. Our adventures are over now,” he 
said. “ Everything’s come out all right. We’ll 
brighten up the fire a bit and that boat of ours should 
be coming back before long.” 

“ But he — he,” she whispered, and nodded 
mutely in the direction of Beech Hill. “ He’s still 
there.” 

“ Never mind him,” said Jeffrey. “ We’ll attend 
to him presently. We’ll brighten up the fire a little 
and . . . Isn’t there a drop or two of that 

brandy left? ” 


310 


THE WATCHERS AND THE WATCHED 

“ You’re very good to me,” she said unsteadily. 
And then suddenly she reached out and caught one 
of his hands in both of hers. “ But — please, don’t 
go away. Never mind the lire. I don’t want to be 
left alone. Somehow — somehow the old fear is all 
coming back.” 

“ After all,” said I, “ it only takes one of us to 
get the firewood.” 

I rose somewhat stiffly. I’ll admit, gave them a 
cheerful nod and tramped off into the thicket. She*" 
didn’t seem to mind my going somehow, though she 
seemed grateful enough over my offer to replenish 
the lire. 

I wasn’t sorry to tramp around a little and get 
some of the stiffness out of my legs, and I went rather 
farther afield than a search for firewood made neces- 
sary. Before I came back I decided I’d go down to 
the bank at the lower end of the island and see if 
Richards and the police boat weren’t in sight any- ^ 
where. But before that, I wanted a look at Beech 
Hill and the boat landing. I thought it possible that 
I might catch a glimpse of Crow. I suppose it was 
the thought of him that made me pick my way rather 
quietly through the undergrowth and down the slope 
toward the river’s edge. 

From where I stood I commanded a pretty good 
stretch of the Beech Hill shore line and my eyes 
were busy with the shadows that still lingered in 
the thickets above, when something — I suppose 

311 


THE GHOST GIRE 


it must have been a sound — made me look around. 

Just past the end of a little point, here on Hog 
Island, I saw projecting out the stern of a little 
boat — a river skiff. 

I went toward it automatically. We wanted a 
boat, and here was one come ashore — one that had 
drifted here likely enough. For all that I moved 
cautiously and my footsteps in the soft sand didn’t 
make a sound. I rounded the little point, clear of 
an over-growing bush and saw the boat’s sculls were 
still in it, not unshipped. But the thing that en- 
graved itself on my mind — the thing I can see yet, 
and that still brings back a certain horror, was the 
trailing end of the painter tied around the forward 
thwart. 

I stared at it for a breathless instant, then looked 
up and saw Crow crouching there, revolver in hand. 

He saw me at the same instant, smiled wickedly 
and raised his revolver. There wasn’t time even 
for a shout. I ducked my head, plunged at him — 
he wasn’t more than six feet away — got a tight grip 
around his waist and we went down together. Then 
there was a blinding flash and silence. 


CHAPTER XXI 

HOW IT ENDED 


I T was a soft, warm, alluring May morning; the 
spring sky had just the thinnest of gauzy cloud 
veils drawn across it to keep the impetuous young 
sun from making love too ardently to the half-grown 
foliage that sheathed the trees, when I issued my 
ultimatum. When I began it, Madeline was alone 
in the room with me watching me finish my break- 
fast. But Jack dropped in to see how I was, before 
starting downtown, and of course Gwendolen came 
along, too, and they were in time to hear the 
finish. I never summed up before a jury more elo- 
quently. 

“ Tm not ill,” I said. “ There hasn’t been any- 
thing the matter with me for a week. I’m not going 
to be treated any longer as if I were marked ‘ fragile 
— perishable — with great care.’ If you people 
will just go away and let me dress. I’ll get up and 
show you a few things. And you needn’t think it’s 
a joke either,” I concluded, for they were smiling at 
each other as if my stern decision were not to be 
taken seriously. 

“ It happens,” said Madeline, “ that Doctor Arm- 
strong said last night, that if you slept well and if 

21 313 


THE GHOST GIRL 

this turned out a fine day, we could take you out for 
a ride.” 

“ Well,” said I, partly mollified, “ that’s all right 
as far as it goes. But it doesn’t go half far enough. 
I want to be told what’s happened. I have lived 
on intellectual malted milk long enough. Oh, I 
know everything’s all right, of course. Jeffrey’s 
come up and grinned at me every day and you’ve 
been bringing me bunches of sweetpeas and things 
with Claire’s regards. So I know that she’s all 
right, too. But I want to know what happened 
after Crow hit me on the head. I want to know 
whether he got off. I want to know whether Bar- 
ton’s still in jail. I expect he deserves to be, but I 
hope he isn’t all the same. I want the whole story 
without any gaps in it and without being patted on 
the head and told not to worry about that just now.” 

“ You’re getting to be a detective,” said Gwen- 
dolen impudently, as if I hadn’t a claim to be called 
one already. “ How did you know Doctor Arm- 
strong said that we could tell you all that to-day? ” 

That took all the wind out of my sails in a hurry. 

“Did he really?” I exclaimed. “Well, then 
begin.” 

“ Oh, it’s all settled,” said Jack. “ That’s Jeff- 
rey’s job. We’re all going to the studio at eleven 
o’clock and he’s going to tell his tale.” 

“ You, too! ” I exclaimed. “ I didn’t think any- 
thing could tempt you from the office.” 

314 


HOW IT ENDED 


“ From church, you mean,” he said. “ This is 
Sunday. Oh, I confess it’s a loss, but IVe made up 
my mind to it.” 

“ You’ll have to hurry, though,” said Madeline, 
as if hurry weren’t the thing I had been demanding, 
“ it’s after ten o’clock. 

I was a bit wobbly about the knees to be sure and 
my head had a way of turning giddy, the natural re- 
sult of being kept flat on my back while the crack 
in my skull had time to knit together again. So I 
hadn’t much energy left to bother them with ques- 
tions while I was being dressed and helped down- 
stairs and bundled into Jack’s limousine, which had 
all the glass down in honor of the day. But there 
was a sort of determined look about all my family 
that convinced me that I shouldn’t get any answers 
yet, anyway. So I admired the park as we drove 
through and talked politics with Jack, just as if the 
word “ curiosity ” had never been printed in my 
dictionary. 

But once I was safely deposited in Jeffrey’s Mor- 
ris chair, with Madeline on the arm of it, and my 
best pipe drawing comfortably, the whole story came 
back over me with a rush. Perhaps it was the 
studio itself. I hadn’t been there since the after- 
noon when Richards and I had watched the face — ' 
the face we had thought to be Irene Fournier’s — • 
appear from under its mask of disguising paint on 
Jeffrey’s canvas. 


315 


THE GHOST GIRL 


Jeffrey never seemed so slow as when one tried to 
hurry him. But at last he turned to me with a grin 
and asked me where I wanted him to begin the 
story. 

“ Where begin ! ” I cried. “ Begin by telling me 
how it happened that Crow didn’t get you and Miss 
Claire as well as I hadn’t time to give you any 
warning and if ever I saw a man hunting human 
game, he was that man.” 

“ I can’t explain that reasonably myself,” said 
Jeffrey. “ It was all Claire’s doing. She kept get- 
ting whiter and whiter after you had gone away and 
at last she said she couldn’t stand it. She’d got to 
know what had become of you. She said she was 
sure you couldn’t be gone as long as that. Though 
you hadn’t been gone long, really. So I got up and 
handed her my revolver. ‘ That’s just for com- 
pany,’ I said. ‘ There’s absolutely nothing to fear 
now from anybody.’ 

“ All the same her mood had rather got hold of 
me and I tacked along northwest — the direction 
you’d started in, making as little noise as possible. 
I told myself I was doing that in order to have a 
better chance of hearing you. But that wasn’t the 
reason. 

“ There is a second little ridge on the island be- 
yond the main one and when I climbed that, I got a 
clear view of the branch of the river and of Beech 
Hill on the other side. And then I glanced down 
316 


HOW IT ENDED 

and saw Crow. He hadn’t got very far from his 
boat then and I could see you lying there in the mud 
behind him. I thought he’d finished you. I imag- 
ine he thought so, too. But — well, luckily a man’s 
feelings don’t have time to operate in a situation 
like that. He doesn’t do anything but think. 

“ Crow snapped up his revolvfn* and covered me, 
grinning, just as Claire had described him. But it 
was the last grin he ever wore. He was nearly 
thirty paces away and I figured he had a pretty good 
chance to miss at that distance, so I turned a little 
away from him, leaned back a little and made a 
slight signal with my hand, as if to somebody else 
who was coming along behind and to the right of 
me. His eye wavered at that — almost any man’s 
will — and I jumped aside and got cover behind a 
tree. ‘ Come on, Richards,’ I yelled, ‘ down to the 
left and get his boat. I’ll get him myself.' Then, 
making all the noise I could, I came crashing down 
the hill a little further. 

“ It was an old trick, of course, and yet there was 
a certain plausibility about it, because he didn’t know 
of any way that I could know that Richards was up 
there, unless I really had him with me. He hesi- 
tated a second and then made a dash for his boat. 
He pushed off and then backed away a few strokes 
with the sculls. Then he hesitated again. I think 
the fact that he wasn’t fired on may have convinced 
him that he had been tricked. But the next minute 


317 


THE GHOST GIRL 


there was a shot from over at the right. Claire 
fired it when she heard me call out and that de- 
cided it. 

“ He began pulling straight out toward the river. 
But a couple of minutes later, Richards and the 
police boat hove in sight around the end of the 
island. I swear I never thought I should be so glad 
to see the Lieutenant. Crow waved to him as if 
nothing was the matter and began pulling deliber- 
ately enough toward the Beech Hill landing, just as 
if he meant to get there first and welcome him 
ashore. But he hadn’t gone three boat lengths, 
when I heard another motor and saw Jack’s limou- 
sine come tearing down the drive and pull up in the 
circle just at the head of the bank. 

“ I shouted to Richards. ‘ Get him. Get Crow. 
Don’t let him go ashore.’ 

“ Crow stopped rowing at once and waited for 
the police boat to come alongside. I didn’t pay 
attention to anything more just then, because as soon 
as I saw that Jack and Gwendolen were safe, I was 
down over you, trying to find out whether he’d left 
anything of you or not.” 

His voice made amends for the jocularity of his 
words. Indeed I could see that that was the only 
way he could speak of a moment like that. There 
was a little silence, then he went on with his story. 

“ Richards gave me the details of what happened 
next. Crow unshipped his sculls and stood up in the 
318 


HOW IT ENDED 


boat when the police boat came alongside, just in the 
act apparently, of climbing aboard the other boat 
And then it looked as if something had tripped him. 
Richards doesn’t think he meant to do it. I can’t be 
sure. Richards says it was the painter — that very 
same long painter. Drew . . .” 

“ Yes,” I said, “ I know.” 

“ Anyhow, he threw up his arms in an attempt to 
gain his balance, and went overboard, capsizing the 
skiff as he did so. Of course, they expected him to 
come up and wasted a minute or two for that to 
happen. But he never did come up until they found 
him with the grappling hooks. His pockets were 
weighted — not with regular weights, but with all 
sorts of heavy things. There were two revolvers 
— one of them was Barton’s automatic — and a bag 
of English sovereigns. Oh, and a lot of documents 
and notebooks and things that he evidently hadn’t 
time to destroy. He was ready to make a good get- 
away, if he got the chance. 

“We rigged a blanket for you and took you and 
Claire over to Beech Hill and — well, that’s about 
all to that part of the story.” 

“ One more question, Jeffrey,” said I. “ Why 
didn’t Crow kill her as soon as he got her down there 
to Beech Hill? Why did he wait? ” 

“ I’ve an idea,” said Jeffrey, “ that we found the 
reason down at the boathouse. Someone had been 
working down there very recently, on a dragnet, put- 

319 


THE GHOST GIRL 


ting the weights on it. He didn’t mean to make 
Barton’s mistake, and he wanted everything ready 
first. And then — well, there was chloral enough 
in the coffee he left for her to drink and that she 
happened not to want, to have put her sound asleep 
if not to have killed her. Oh, it was complete 
enough. It was the net that finished Richards. He 
looked as sick as I felt, when he saw it, and as soon 
as he could get to a telephone, he sent word to turn 
Barton loose.” 

“ How did Richards feel about the whole thing? ” 
I asked. “ Rather sore and aggrieved, I suppose, 
over having gone after everybody but the real 
criminal.” 

“ Thank the Lord for something cheerful to talk 
about at last! ” said Jeffrey, and the rest were all 
shaken with sudden laughter. 

“Can you find it?” asked Gwendolen. “You 
lose nearly everything, you know.” 

“ Never this,” said Jeffrey proudly, and he took 
from his pocket what proved to be an editorial clip- 
ping from one of the more serious evening papers. 

“ It is often [the editorial began] the unpleasant duty of 
this newspaper to speak in sharp criticism of the police de- 
partment. And consequently, it is doubly refreshing to 
have an opportunity to offer it unqualified praise as well as 
our hearty congratulation on the possession of so brilliant 
and efficient an officer as Lieutenant Richards. The solu- 
tion of the mystery of the Beech Hill murder would be a 
320 


HOW IT ENDED 


credit to the police department in any of the European capi- 
tals, and in our own annals it is unique. With an absence 
of bluster and noise, with admirable reticence, with persever- 
ance and logic, and occasional flashes of intuition almost un- 
canny, this officer unraveled the tangled ends of that mys- 
tery and brought it to a triumphant solution. 

“ From the fact that the suicide or the accidental drown- 
ing of the criminal at the moment of his capture obviates 
the necessity of a sensational trial — and for this the 
community is to be congratulated, — it is only fair to 
attempt to give Lieutenant Richards some portion of the 
reclame that would have been his if the trial had taken 
place. 

“ I wanted Richards to come around this morn- 
ing,” said Jeffrey, “ but he told me he was busy. In 
fact, he has told me that every time I have asked 
him, since that editorial appeared. But, judging 
from his voice over the ’phone, he isn’t sore a bit.” 
He pulled out his watch. “ Claire ought to be here 
now,” he said. “ She — she still doesn’t feel much 
like hearing the story told over again, but she’s 
awfully anxious to ^ee you.” 

There was something new in Jeffirey’s tone — 
something almost shamefaced about his expression. 
The carefree impudence that one associated with him 
on most occasions, had somehow disappeared. And 
— yes, by jove, he was blushing! 

Just then we heard a step in the corridor. 
“ There she is,” he cried, and sprung to the door 
and flung it open. 


321 


THE GHOST GIRL 


Yes, there she was. If ever it was possible to see 
the personification of springtime come walking into 
a room and turn the cool north light of a studio 
golden, we saw it then. 

She didn’t look at Jeffrey, just held out a 
momentary left hand to him. But — well, she was 
blushing a little, too. 

She came straight over to me, holding out both 
hands. “ I’ve wanted to see you before,” she said, 
“ but they told me it mightn’t be good for you to 
have another look at me until you were quite 
well.” 

“ I’m sure it would have been,” said I. 

“ Have you shown him the portrait, yet — the 
new portrait? ” she asked, turning to Jeffrey. 

He shook his head. “ I thought I’d give him a 
glimpse of the original first. I didn’t want him to 
be disappointed.” 

“ Aunt is coming to see it this afternoon,” she 
said. 

“ Miss Meredith ! ” I exclaimed, confidently 
enough. “ Is she . . .” 

“ She’s getting better,” Claire said, soberly. “ I 
think in a few months more we’ll have her quite 
recovered.” 

But the subject was a little difficult to talk about. 
“ Well, I’m glad to see this Miss Meredith so fully 
recovered, anyway,” said I. 

“ You’re not going to call me that,” she said. 

322 


HOW IT ENDED 


“ The others — Madeline and Gwendolen, and 
Jack — all say Tm to be one of the family.” 

“Hmp!” said Jeffrey. “They’re not the only 
ones who say that. As a matter of fact, I said it 
first myself.” 


( 1 ) 


THE END 






Books 



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Appleton’s Recent Books 


THE SINS OF THE FATHER. By Thomas 

Dixon, author of '^The Clansman/’ ^^The Leopard’s 

Spots/’ etc. With l6 pictures by John Cassel. 12mo. 

Cloth, $1.35 net. Postpaid, $1.47. 

“Thomas Dixon’s new and virile romance of the South is easily the best 
of this writer’s always impressive novels. The theme is daring — the ‘ call 
of the beast’ to a white man who detests the sin he commits through the 
animal charm of a handsome mulatto woman. But the treatment is 
dignified, delicate and marked by a reserve that at once lifts the book 
from the melodramatic ranks in which its thrilling material might natur- 
ally place it. No hint of claptrap or coarseness mars a really noble tale. 
This, in more ways than one, is a notable book .” — Chicago Record-Herald. 


THE POSTMASTER. By Joseph C. Lincoln, 

author of ^^Cap’n Warren’s Wards,” “The Depot Master,” 
“The Woman-Haters,” etc. Illustrated. Cloth, $1.30 
net. Postpaid, $1.42. 

The deliciously humorous and thoroughly human experiences of a 
middle-aged sea captain, who “retires” from a life on the sea and imme- 
diately becomes postmaster, storekeeper and principal citizen of a Cape 
Cod Village. “No breezier story of New England life was ever written 
than this. A confirmed dyspeptic would forget his misery before he read 
half through the second chapter .” — Albany Argus. “‘The Postmaster’ 
is as nectar to one athirst. You can almost hear the ha ha’s as they ring 
around the novel-reading world .” — Philadelphia Record. 


THE DEPARTMENT STORE. ByMargarete 

Bohme. Translated from the German by Ethel Colburn 
Mayne. 12mo. Cloth, $1.30 net. Postpaid, $1.42. 

An unusual story, the scenes of which are laid in a great department 
store. The central figure is an orphan girl. “A chronicle of the birth 
and growth of a colossal modem emporium. ‘The Department Store’ is 
a distinctly remarkable book, a very readable book. A strong, bold, un- 
flinching portrayal. You feel yourself caught and drawn along, breath- 
less .” — The Bookman. 

A2 


Appleton’ s Recent Books 


THE FAVOR OF KINGS. By Mary Hastings 

Bradley. Illustrated. Cloth, $1.30 net. Postpaid, $1.42. 

The most spectacular romance of English history — the story of beau- 
tiful, proud, ill-fated Anne Boleyn, second wife of Henry VIII and mother 
of Queen Elizabeth. “There is no moment when the long, thrilling tale, 
well constructed, well characterized, crammed with rapid action, fails to 
interest and convince .” — Chicago Record-Herald. 


THE SHERIFF OF BADGER. By George 

Pattullo. Illustrated. Cloth, $1.25 net. Postpaid, $1.37. 

A vigorous romance of the cowboy country. A story of the modern 
cowboy of the Southwest, the man who does not live with a gun in his 
hand, but who fights to a finish when necessity demands it. The Sheriff 
of Badger is a flesh and blood individual of pluck and quiet daring. His 
breezy adventures will keep you keenly interested and highly enter- 
tained. 

THE MAKER OF OPPORTUNITIES. By 

George Gibbs, author of ^^The Bolted Door,” ^^The 
Forbidden Way,” etc. Illustrated. Cloth, $1.25 net. 
Postpaid, $1.37. 

A bright, breezy story about a young club man, who spends all of his 
time and most of his comfortable income in providing matrimonial and 
other opportunities for his friends. “Very entertaining, full of dash and 
vivacity and of cleverness .” — Richmond Times Dispatch. 

> 

THE DIARY OF A FRESHMAN. By 

Charles Macomb Flandrau, author of ^^Viva Mexico,” 
"Prejudices,” etc. New edition. 12mo, Cloth, 75 cents 
net. Postpaid, 87 cents. 

This classic of undergraduate life relates the adventures and misad- 
veatures of a youth fresh from a Western home, who is suddenly dropped 
into the turmoil of his opening year at a ^eat Eastern college. From the 
moment that “ Mamma left for home” right up to Class Day, the author 
chronicles minutely and most amusingly the experiences of his freshman 
hero. 

A3 


Appleton’s Recent Books 


THE MYSTERY OF THE SECOND SHOT 

By Rufus Gillmore. Illustrated with Peii-and-In 
Sketches by Herman Heyer. 12mo. Cloth, $1.25 ne 
Postpaid, $1.37. 

Bertrand Newhall, a scheming Boston banker, gets control of an oL 
reliable trust company, wrecks it to bolster up another business, and di 
appears. Police and reporters hunt him in vain. As Ashley, a reporte 
is “combing” the neighborhood of Newhall’s home for evidence, a your 
girl draws him inside a house, where he finds the banker dead, a pist< 
beside him. The police call it suicide, but Ashley thinks differently, an 
ultimately he solves a problem quite new in the annals of crime. 


THE NAMELESS THING. By Meiviii 

Davisson Post, author of ^^The Gilded Chair,” etc 
Illustrated. 12mo. Cloth, $1.25 net. Postpaid, $1.3'/ 

A thrilling mystery story. The queer death of a recluse in his librar 
is the main theme. There is absolutely no clue, and the mystery i 
doubled by the fact that, although the room is shot up and in the greates 
disorder, both windows and door are found locked on the inside — the ma ■ 
dead in a pool of his own blood. The clearing up of this mystery lead 
the reader through many exciting adventures. “Something exceptions 
in the way of detective stories. It is such stories as these that dignify th 
art of fiction writing .” — Boston Transcript. 


THE TREVOR CASE. By Natalie S. Lincoln 

Illustrated by Edmund Frederick. 12mo. Cloth 
$1.30 net. Postpaid, $1.42. 

One of the most ingenious and exciting detective novels of recent years 
The scene is Washington. The beautiful young wife of the Attorney 
General is found murdered. A burglar is caught leaving the house, bu 
incriminating evidence points to other people high in official and politics ■ 
life. There is a bewildering conflict of clues and a series of startlin, 
climaxes before the case is cleared up. Not one reader in fifty can gues 
the ending. 


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